Is Google Promoting Video Piracy?

From the 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.

The National Legal and Policy Center promotes ethics and accountability in public life. And NLPC is not afraid to take on major foes: it won the Federal lawsuit against Clinton's Health Care Task Force for operating in violation of Federal law and more recently exposed the $23 Billion dollar Boeing tanker scandal where a former Air Force official and Boeing's Chief Financial Officer went to prison.

Many believe that Google is facilitating the piracy of copyrighted movies, concerts and music by turning a blind eye to copyright infringement on Goolgle Video and YouTube because they value the traffic – and ultimately profits -- that the illegally posted content generates. And make no mistake about it, copyright infringement around the globe hurts everyone. Our own Carl Horowitz recently wrote that theft of copyrighted movies alone is a scandal that resulted in our film industry losing an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue to worldwide Internet piracy.

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."  [RJ]