The Pirate Bay has long been a thorn in the side of copyright holders, but when Britain’s record industry trade association asked Google to remove the notorious file-sharing site from its homepage, the search engine refused to comply.

The British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) has helped spearhead efforts to reduce the visibility of piracy, having sent Google more than 30 million requests to remove copyright offenders over the past year, Torrent Freak reports.

The BPI, which comprises the big three record companies (Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Universal Music Group), hundreds of independents representing thousands of labels as well as associated manufactures and distributors, is every bit the stake holder in the anti-piracy crusade as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the US, albeit less well-known stateside.

Last week, the BPI sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice containing over 2,000 URLs which allegedly infringe the US law criminalizing production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works.

The most prominent site mentioned in the request was the prolific peer-to-peer file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, which has long been in the crosshairs of copyright holders.

Google, however, refused to comply with the BPI’s request, making The Pirate Bay homepage the only URL in the entire notice where no proscriptive action was taken.

The catch is that while search results on The Pirate Bay provides links to hundreds of thousands of infringing titles, its own homepage in fact provides no links to pirated content.

This means that while The Pirate Bay’s search results pages may not show up in the Google index, the site’s homepage meets these standards, and should not be excluded.

Google responded to the BPI request to take down thepiratebay.sx with a resounding “No Action Taken.”

Google offered the following response:

“Number of URLs specified in this copyright removal request that we did not remove because we did not find the specified copyright infringement; we already reviewed the URLs in a previous request; or the URLs were malformed or otherwise led to an error.”

While Google might be accused of being soft on piracy, they did in fact take down the other 29 unique domains on the BPI request, which spans 2,055 URLS.

However, the RIAA had previously been unimpressed by the search giant’s efforts, giving it a less than stellar assessment in a February 2013 'Report Card on Google’s demotion of Pirate Sites.'

“On August 10, 2012, Google announced that it would take into account in its search result rankings the number of valid copyright removal notices it has received for a given site. Per its announcement, “sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower” in its search results. The result of the change should be to “help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.” Six months later, we have found no evidence that Google’s policy has had a demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy. These sites consistently appear at the top of Google’s search results for popular songs or artists.”

Torrent Freak notes that this is not the first time The Pirate Bay has been targeted with a takedown request. Four years ago the popular P2P site was taken down briefly after Google received a DMCA complaint, although it was quickly reinstated.

The popular blog further noted the overall number of DMCA requests has been on the rise over the last several months, with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) taking aim at streaming portals with this method. 

Google has thus far been unwilling to comply with many such requests.

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