According to its 2021 annual Transparency Report, the social platform Reddit received 177,450 copyright notices, reporting 920,672 items of content; a 104% increase in volume over 2020. About 70% of these items were removed in response. Requests by governments and law enforcement for user information was also up: by 32% over their 2020 level.
Reddit said that it permanently suspended 2,813 users and banned 2,625 subreddits for excessive copyright infringement in 2021.
Not all infringement notices prove to be valid. In some cases, the application may be incomplete, the reported instance may prove not to be infringing, or the reported item may already have been removed. In other cases, content may fall under fair use that is allowed by copyright law, or not subject to copyright. Out of 2021’s 920,672 reported items, 665,898 of them did not qualify for removal.
Overall, the number of transactions to Reddit in 2021 was about 5.77 billion, which consisted of posts, comments, private messages and chats.
Read Reddit’s 2021 Transparency Report
Visit Reddit’s Copyright Help Center
Why it matters
Reddit has a particular challenge in that virtually its entire repository of content is posted by its users. To police for infringing content and ensure compliance with its Content Policy, Reddit uses a combination of volunteer help from its communities, moderators, administrators, automated tools, and processes available to copyright holders to submit removal requests.
