There is no doubt that pirating music has become an epidemic that is causing huge problems for the music industry. With the limited purchase of CDs and actual “physical” music, artists and labels are now under attack by music piracy. Torrents all across the world are sharing and offering up illegal downloads to music, movies, and software that cost industries billions of dollars each year.
Google has removed more than 100 million urls linking to these sites over the past year. They average 15 million url removal requests per month. While this number sounds huge, copyright holders are still far from satisfied.
100 million urls removed is already double the amount over the entire year of 2012. It is obvious that copyright holders are doing their best to crackdown on illegal downloads and trying to increase profits for their clients and the industry as a whole.
The top three offenders over the last year were FireTube with 5,801,661 URLS, then Torrentz.eu with 2,508,595, and Rapidgator.net with 2,166,977.