By Stewart Tongue

YNOT – Google received nearly double the usual volume of DMCA takedown notices during the first week after the search giant activated a new algorithm that considers DMCA notice volume when ranking results. According to a Google spokesperson, the company received nearly 1.5 million URL removal requests in seven days.

To put the exponential rise in context, approximately one year ago the search giant reported it had received slightly more than 130,000 DMCA requests in one week. That makes the increase an astounding 1,137 percent.

Google reported that during the past four weeks, it was asked by 1,825 copyright owners and 1,406 anti-piracy reporting organizations to de-list 5.75 million URLs across 32,545 domains, and the company expects the numbers to increase as the new DMCA system becomes more widely used.

Sites like The Pirate Bay that routinely flaunt their disregard for DMCA rules and content ownership rights likely will continue to exist without the assistance of search engines. Content owners see appreciative, though, that casual surfers no longer will find it quite as easy to locate stolen material on more covert sites.

So far, no official word has emerged about how many DMCA takedown notices may have been attempts by one company to harm a competitor by submitting bogus piracy claims.

A related question has surfaced on social networking sites: If Google’s DMCA experiment is successful, could social networks devise a way to limit piracy within their ranks, as well?