Reddit Rejected over 80% of DMCA Notices Received in 2016

[CrAKeN]

 

Reddit opens up about DMCAs

 

In the past year, Reddit has received 3,294 DMCA takedown notices, most of which were thrown to the garbage can. 

 

According to Reddit's brand new transparency report regarding the number of piracy takedown notices, copyright holders asked the company to take down a lot of content. Out of the 3,294 requests it received, Reddit rejected 81% of them.

 

Reddit is clearly one of the most visited websites in the world, and rightfully so. The community-oriented platform has subreddits dedicated to pretty much everything you can think of and more are posted every day.

 

On occasion, however, some copyright infringing material will filter through and land on its pages, much like it happens on any platform that deals with this much traffic.

 

The transparency report the company published shows just how much attention the site is getting from copyright holders. Most times, it seems, they're bothered over nothing.

 

"For a request to be valid, it must comply with the statutory requirements outlined in the DMCA. Each DMCA takedown notice is reviewed carefully and, in circumstances where content is actually hosted on our servers, we assess whether the existence of the content on Reddit can fall under an exception, such as 'fair use' of the copyrighted material," Reddit explains.

 

A different approach

Given the number of rejected DMCA notices, it's clear that Reddit doesn't just blindly remove posts linking to copyrighted content. After all, the company has previously stated that it does not believe that links generally infringe copyright, something that certainly annoyed a lot of Hollywood execs.

 

According to Reddit's report, out of the copyright removal requests it received, they were required to remove content from the site in 610 instances, making for a 19% approval rate.

 

When compared to Google, that's nothing. In fact, Google is flooded with millions upon millions of requests every year and its automated process has reached a removal rate of 90%. Of course, comparing the two isn't much of a solution since there is such a big gap between the numbers, but it's still telling of the policy applied by each company.

 

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