Hundreds of Thousands of 'Pirate' Sites Disappear Following Takedown Notices

An anonymous reader shares a report: Every week millions of these requests are sent to hosting platforms, as well as third-party services, such as search engines. Quite a few of the major players, including Twitter, Google, and Bing, publish these requests online. However, due to the massive volume, it's hard for casual observers to spot any trends in the data. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Boston University aim to add some context with an elaborate study covering a broad database of takedown requests. Their results are now bundled in a paper titled: 'Who Watches the Watchmen: Exploring Complaints on the Web.'

The research covers all takedown requests that were made available through the Lumen Database in 2017. The majority of these were sent to Google, with Bing, Twitter, and Periscope as runners-up. In total, more than one billion reported URLs were analyzed. Most takedown requests or 'web complaints' were copyright-related, 98.6% to be precise. This means that other notices, such as defamation reports, court orders, and Government requests, make up a tiny minority. The researchers report that the complaints were submitted by 38,523 unique senders, covering 1.05 billion URLs. While that's a massive number, most reported links are filed by a very small group of senders.

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