BPI reported over 500 million illegal music links to Google to Google with a request to remove them from the search engine’s listings. This was done as part of BPI’s mission to protect the UK music industry from the activities of illegal music sites which cost them an estimated £150 million a year in lost revenue.
The BPI passed the milestone of the 500 millionth URL submitted to Google for delisting on behalf of UK artists and labels. The BPI is the world’s second-highest remover of content from Google, and in addition has sent 398 million removal notices to Microsoft for Bing & Yahoo. The BPI expects to pass one billion total links submitted for removal by search engines during 2020. In total, over 4.5 billion infringing links have to date been removed from Google by all copyright holders globally.
The removal notices sent by the BPI are targeted at thousands of illegal sites of all types, including P2P torrent sites and trackers, mp3 aggregators, cyberlockers and stream rippers, and they protect the recordings of tens of thousands of artists and labels every year. Reaching this milestone shows that, despite the progress made, the rights of creators continue to be infringed online on an industrial scale.
Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive BPI & BRIT Awards, said, “The fact the BPI has had to delist half a billion infringing music links from Google alone, on behalf of UK artists and labels, highlights the staggering scale of the problem of illegal sites, as well as BPI’s unwavering commitment to fighting for the rights of artists and their record labels.”
“Under a code of practice BPI and MPAA negotiated with search engines in 2017, persistent illegal sites are now regularly demoted out of search results, and together with the legal actions we bring to block illegal sites, this has significantly improved the quality of results presented to consumers”
The BPI has taken a multi-pronged approach to the piracy problem, including search delisting, legal actions to close down or block access to illegal sites, working with law enforcement to disrupt revenues streams to bad actors, investigating organised crime, and educating consumers through its participation in CCUK’s Get it Right (from a Genuine Site) campaign.
The collaboration with search engines is a key element in reducing piracy, as many users find piracy sites through Search, primarily Google. In 2019, the BPI delisted 314,000 titles by 55,000 artists represented by 13,000 labels from over 9,000 pirate sites. The majority of titles delisted were on behalf of independent labels. 1,000 of the sites actioned in 2019 were subject to demotion and virtually disappeared from Search, which significantly reduced the amount of traffic they received from both UK and global users.
Since January 2020, the BPI has already delisted 8 million URLs from Google, associated with 170,000 albums and tracks, on behalf of 31,000 artists and 9,000 labels, across 4,000 pirate sites. The BPI expects to reach 1 Bn delisted URLs across Google & Bing combined by the end of 2020.
