Reddit’s Copyright Removals Drop to Multi-Year Low

Reddit's latest transparency report reveals a notable reversal in copyright takedown trends. After years of increases, the platform removed just over 550,000 items last year due to copyright complaints, down sharply from roughly 1.2 million removed in 2023. Notably, Reddit keeps an eye on potential overreach; it declined to remove an AI-generated sports parody, deeming it transformative fair use.

reddit logoWith millions of daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

The community-oriented platform has “subreddits” dedicated to pretty much every topic one can think of, including several that are linked to online piracy and related issues.

As the platform continued to grow into the $17 billion company that it is today, rightsholders started to pay attention to these discussions. Eight years ago, Reddit was asked to remove ‘just’ 4,352 pieces of content, but that increased to well over a million a few years later.

Reddit Publishes Transparency Report
This week, Reddit published its latest transparency report which shows that this year-long upward trend has reversed recently. The company now receives fewer and fewer takedown requests.

The takedown surge peaked in 2023 with rightsholders asking the platform to remove more than 1.7 million pieces of content. The latest figures indicate that this number declined by roughly 50% last year to 879,645.

reddit trans down
This is a significant drop by itself. However, it’s even more pronounced if we look at the number of requests Reddit took action on. This decreased to 550,554 items last year, compared to 1.2 million removals a year earlier.

The lower actionability rate is mostly driven by the second half of last year, where less than half of all items flagged by rightsholders were removed. This is mostly caused by duplicate reports.

The chart below(*) shows that Reddit also declined to take action in response to tens of thousands of reports because it didn’t find any infringement. Meanwhile, 5,573 reports failed to identify specific content and 1,721 items were suspected to be fraudulently reported.

non action reasons
Fair ‘AI’ Use
Reddit also declined to remove content because it deemed these to be “fair use”. The absolute number for these is very low, 360 items in the final half of last year, but the reasons provided are all the more intriguing.

For example, Reddit declined to take action in response to a notice from a major sports rightsholder because the identified clip wasn’t a full broadcast, but an AI-generated parody.

“The rightsholder for a major televised sporting event submitted a copyright takedown notice seeking the removal of a video from Reddit, and identified their copyrighted work as a full broadcast,” Reddit notes.

“The video posted to Reddit used AI to significantly transform and parody a short clip taken from the original broadcast. We declined to remove this content because we believe it makes fair use of the broadcast.”

The example provided by Reddit is unique and rare, but it indicates that the company pays attention to individual notices, including potential defenses against copyright infringement claims.

Repeat Infringers
Moving on, Reddit reports that in the second half of 2024, it banned 1,813 users for repeat copyright infringements. In addition, 181 subreddits were banned permanently for the same reason.

The number of user bans is significantly higher than the first half of the year, and for the subreddits this effect is reversed.

repeat infringers
Looking further back, these copyright-related bans are down significantly from their 2022 peak, similar to the removals. Reddit previously banned 5,853 users in 2022, while 3,215 subreddits were taken offline that year.

It will be interesting to see if these copyright action downtrends continue in the years to come. That is certainly not a given, as is exemplified by Google’s recent copyright takedown resurgence.