With many millions of daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet.
The platform celebrated its 20th anniversary this summer and has grown from a hobby site, started by two college roommates, to a billion-dollar company.
This growth also brought added responsibility. In addition to the billions of casual, insightful, and heartwarming messages, Reddit’s popularity was also embraced by those who color outside the lines of the law.
Reddit’s Transparency
One of the issues Reddit has to deal with is copyright infringement, a relatively small task early on. In the first transparency report published ten years ago, Reddit reported that it received 176 takedown requests in an entire year.
Most of these DMCA notices did not lead to any removals, with Reddit stating that the infringing content was often stored on external sites and that “links do not generally infringe copyright.”
Today, that perspective has changed. Reddit’s current copyright overview clearly states that hyperlinks can trigger copyright violations. This is also evident from the many subreddits that warn members not to link to pirated material.
2025: DMCA Notices Up, Removals Down
The volume of takedown notices has also evolved quite a bit. According to Reddit’s latest transparency report, the company received 58,920 copyright takedown notices in the first half of 2025, a 5% increase over the 56,210 notices in the same period last year.
Despite receiving more takedown notices, Reddit actually removed less content, in part due to notices containing fewer links. In the first half of 2025, the platform removed 220,233 pieces of content – a 31% drop from the same period last year.
More Fair Use
Reddit’s reasons for declining to remove content in response to some takedown requests reveal an interesting trend. The number of instances where the company declined to remove content for fair use reasons increased more than 1000%, from 110 to 1,243.
This suggests that Reddit is devoting more attention to defending user-generated commentary and criticism. The transparency report lists several examples of fair use cases, including a discussion about copyrighted poems.
“We received a removal request from the creator of multiple poems, for a Reddit image post featuring said poems. The Reddit post also contained interpretations and criticism of the author’s intent. We declined to remove this content because we believe it made fair use of the poems,” Reddit writes.
Fair use remains a relatively rare reason to decline takedown requests. Most of the time Reddit takes no action is because the content has already been removed or no infringement was found.
Subreddit and User Bans
The latest transparency report also shows a significant increase in the number of subreddits that were banned for repeat copyright violations. In the first half of 2025, the company removed 709 subreddits, more than double the number it removed in the same period last year.
While subreddit bans skyrocketed, bans against individual user accounts for repeat copyright infringements grew at a more modest pace. Reddit banned 837 user accounts in the first half of the year, up from 757 bans in H1 of 2024.
These swings may suggest that copyright-infringement-related bans are reaching new highs, but that is not the case. If we zoom out further, we see that Reddit banned 3,215 subreddits and 5,853 users for excessive copyright infringement in 2022, which was the all-time high.
A Speck on the Radar
Zooming out further, it soon becomes clear that a few hundred users and subreddits banned for infringement are little more than a speck on the radar. Reddit and its moderators remove many more for other reasons, including spam, violent content, and harassment.
In the first half of 2025, Reddit mods and admins removed more than 158 million pieces of content from the site, while over 2 billion new posts and comments were added.
During the same period, Reddit admins banned 430,544 subreddits, mostly related to spam, while 2,613,473 users were issued temporary and permanent account bans, with ‘violent content’ the most cited reason. From this perspective, a few hundred copyright-related bans sound rather insignificant.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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