A Brazilian based anti-piracy outfit appears to be creating their own piracy pages, so they can ask Google to remove these URLs that were never indexed by Google in the first place. The strange phenomenon has caused a site that has little actual traffic to receive requests to take down more than 49 million URLs.
MP3 download site MP3Toys is now the site with the second most number of take-down requests, as listed by Google's Transparency Report. This is despite the fact that the site receives very little human visitors, and is relatively unknown within the piracy scene.
This prompted torrent news website TorrentFreak to investigate what has occurred, and to their amazement, it appears Brazilian anti-piracy outfit APDIF is responsible for not only most of the take-down requests, and but also for creating the infringing pages in the first place.
This is what happened. The MP3Toys site has a function that dynamically creates pages based on search terms. Instead of finding existing URLs and asking them to be removed, for some unspecified reason, APDIF has decided to create their own music title related search and submitted them to the site's search pages, thus creating a new page every time APDIF submitted a new term. This has allowed APDIF to create an infinite number of pages on the MP3Toys website, pages that APDIF then submit for Google for removal.
The only problem is that these pages weren't indexed by Google in the first place, but Google complies with the request nevertheless.
And this is why MP3Toys now has 49 million infringing URLs to its name, with most of them being created by an anti-piracy outfit.
It's unknown if this an unintentional error, or some kind of attempt by a third party anti-piracy company to bill rights-holders for "bogus" take-down requests.
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