Is Google Promoting Video Piracy?
Source: National Legal and Policy Center

Recently Google Video hosted apparently pirated copies of such current major films as “Sicko” and “Evan Almighty.” Both were posted without the permission or knowledge of the copyright owners. This follows a lawsuit against Google by media giant Viacom seeking $1 Billion in damages for allegedly posting approximately 150,000 copyrighted works on its popular YouTube website.

Ironically, many other Internet operations such as MySpace, TorrentSpy, DailyMotion and Break.com have set up filtering systems to block copyrighted material. Google is a $158 Billion company with arguably the most advanced search technology in the world. The argument that they cannot block pirated content because of technological or financial reasons is laughable.
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Our goal is to do our best to expose the pirating of copyrighted material by finding and posting as many apparently pirated works as possible. For starters, we are focusing on Google Video because it hosts many full-length movies and concerts and because it has received less attention than YouTube, also owned by Google.

Our initial “Top 50” list includes 50 full length movies, cable and television shows, and music concert videos posted on Google Video and YouTube and ranked by the number of days the content has been up on the sites. While we have identified several hundred potentially pirated works, our initial list was chosen based on a variety of factors including “views” and popularity.

All of this content was readily available for viewing by any visitor to Google Video or YouTube as recently as Saturday, July 7th 2007. Much of the content is recent and some of the movies posted on Google Video right now are still even in theaters. NLPC intends to update the database periodically with new potentially infringing content and will continue to track how many days potentially infringing content remains on the sites. While it is beyond our resources to produce a definitive database, we hope this effort raises public awareness about the very serious problem of intellectual property theft.

+ PDF file of screen captures for all the movies here (PDF; 1.74 MB)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Intellectual property, Internet, Media and entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.