The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave up on its plan to sue piracy out of existence years ago. Instead of mass-copyright lawsuits, the group is embracing a mass-takedown strategy, sending notices to both infringing sites and the sites that link to them, such as Google. These notices are issued constantly and involve thousands of URLs that the RIAA wants taken down. It has become a giant-sized game of whack-a-mole and the record industry group is seriously tired of it.

The RIAA put a blog post up today complaining that it sent 20 million takedown notices to Google last year. The group has sent almost the same number to the infringing sites themselves. Nevertheless, pirated content keeps appearing in Google searches, often on the same websites. Brad Buckles, an RIAA VP, writes in today's post:

Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. Importantly, the targets of our notices don’t even pretend to be innovators constructing new and better ways to legally enjoy music—they have simply created business models that allow them to profit from giving someone else’s property away for free. So while 20 million might sound impressive, the problem we face with illegal downloading on the Internet is immeasurably larger. And that is just for music.

Buckles goes on to suggest that Google doesn't do anything to punish pirate sites, even when it receives hundreds of notices about a site. He even discusses the idea that the RIAA needs to send a full URL, calling it a "controversial interpretation" of copyright law by a tech company.

We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading. Under a controversial interpretation by search engines, takedown notices must be directed at specific links to specific sound recordings and do nothing to stop the same files from being reposted as fast as they are removed. It is certainly fair for search engines to say that they have no way of knowing whether a particular link on a specific site represents an illegal copy or not. Perhaps it’s fair for them to make that same claim at the second notice. But what about after a thousand notices for the same song on the same site? Isn’t it simply logical and fair at some point to conclude that such links are infringing without requiring content owners to keep expending time and resources to have the link taken down?

The post appears to be an opening shot as Congress prepares to review copyright law and the DMCA. "Some aspects of it no longer work," writes Buckles, but it isn't quite clear from this post how the group would like it to operate. In what seems to be a reference to the "six strikes" system, Buckles notes that "voluntary initiatives" with ISPs, payment processors, and advertisers are a good template.

The 20 million number is based on Google's own self-reporting about the RIAA in its annual transparency report. On May 20 alone, for instance, RIAA member companies sent 17 separate takedown notices to Google, with thousands of URLs in each notice. Eight of the notices had more than 10,000 links each.