A Year And 20 Million Takedown Requests Later, The Music Industry Is Still Grieving

From a blog post signed by the Recording Industry Association Of America we found out that 20 million takedown requests were sent to Google just last year. Furthermore, a similar number of demands were received by infringing websites. Did all this effort help?

“Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. Importantly, the targets of our notices don’t even pretend to be innovators constructing new and better ways to legally enjoy music—they have simply created business models that allow them to profit from giving someone else’s property away for free. So while 20 million might sound impressive, the problem we face with illegal downloading on the Internet is immeasurably larger. And that is just for music,” RIAA wrote.

One of RIAA’s VPs – Brad Buckles – is pointing the finger at the search engine, claiming that its actions account for nothing.

“We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading. Under a controversial interpretation by search engines, takedown notices must be directed at specific links to specific sound recordings and do nothing to stop the same files from being reposted as fast as they are removed.

It is certainly fair for search engines to say that they have no way of knowing whether a particular link on a specific site represents an illegal copy or not. Perhaps it’s fair for them to make that same claim at the second notice. But what about after a thousand notices for the same song on the same site? Isn’t it simply logical and fair at some point to conclude that such links are infringing without requiring content owners to keep expending time and resources to have the link taken down?” he wrote.

To no surprise, RIAA’s blog post comes just as the Congress is getting ready to take another look at US’ copyright law and DMCA.

“The DMCA was intended to define the way forward for technology firms and content creators alike, but some aspects of it no longer work,” Buckles signaled.

“It was passed before Google even existed, or the iPod, or peer-to-peer file-sharing or slick websites offering free mp3 downloads. It was after the DMCA that Napster, and Grokster and Limewire and Grooveshark and Megaupload, to name just a few, came on the scene. In particular, it’s time to rethink the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA,” he concluded.