James Delahunty
12 Dec 2014 14:15
The information spilling onto the Internet as a result of the Sony Pictures hack keeps making headlines, and this time it has exposed a rift between Google and the MPAA.
The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) is a trade group that represents movie studios in the United States. It speaks on behalf of those studios in copyright lobbying and in legal cases, and is essentially their face in the anti-piracy efforts targeted at the Internet.
In recent years it has been pressing more and more on Google to step up and fight piracy by removing links from its search index. Google responded by removing millions of links from its search index when it received DMCA requests, and lately went further to punish sites that are the target of a lot of DMCA complaints.
It had a significant impact too, with many torrent sites seeing a dip in traffic from Google, and the search giant was more than justified in feeling like it had done enough.
The MPAA disagreed however, and made a statement about Google that would turn their relationship sour very quickly.
"Everyone shares a responsibility to help curb unlawful conduct online, and we are glad to see Google acknowledging its role in facilitating access to stolen content via search," an MPAA press release opened with.
That was it for Google, it had enough of the MPAA's nagging and broad accusations against the firm. According to e-mails leaked in the recent Sony Pictures hack, the MPAA informed the studios that Google was extremely unhappy with the statement at the highest levels.
"[Google] conveyed that they feel as if they went above and beyond what the law requires; that they bent over backwards to give us a heads up and in return we put out a 'snarky' statement that gave them no credit for the positive direction."
Google will now only reportedly talk to the studios directly, as it had gotten positive feedback from individual studios at the same time the MPAA was brushing off its efforts.
More information can be read at TorrentFreak.