Record labels association, the BPI, frequently sends notices to search engines requesting that they remove search results that direct people to illegal music files online.
They recently 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 has also sent 398 million removal notices to Microsoft for Bing and Yahoo. They expect to pass one billion total links submitted for removal during 2020.
The removal notices sent by the BPI are targeted at thousands of illegal sites of all types, including 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.
Geoff Taylor, chief executive, BPI and BRIT Awards, says: '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.'
Since January 2020, the BPI has already delisted eight 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.
