Copyright Pirates on the Internet High Seas!

Is Google promoting piracy? What do they need to do, if anything, to combat it? What is Youtube really doing to combat it? Is piracy all of a sudden going mainstream? This is a major issue for Cutcaster and our members or future members. In this blog, we reported on this before when Youtube announced it was going to use AudibleMagic to begin detecting copyrighted content on their site and track the content to pay royalties to the actual owners of it. Personally i thought the response was a very late one and pretty weak to the $1 billion dollar lawsuit it was slapped with by Viacom. Not the kind of lawsuit you want to wake up to but in the end it looked like Viacom's bark was bigger than the bite.

But a report was put out today by The National Legal and Policy Center that suggested that Google was voluntarily neglecting to take down pirated content because they wanted the traffic and profit more than doing the right thing. The stated goal of the NLPC 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." The NLPC is definitely not afraid to go after the big dogs.

In Google's defense, one shouldn't be able to bring a lawsuit or sue someone for indexing content. It's impractical for Google to manage what is legal or not and frankly that is not what Googles role should be. Companies need to pursue the pirates themselves, if anyone. But Google needs to do more and take the lead in this issue or it will come back to bite them. They have working relationships with most of the media companies and they should partner with them to at least give the appearance that they care about the issue and want to help, even if they prefer to be relaxed about the issue for profit motives.

Cutcaster will work with sellers to track down any illegal uses of content creators work. It's a major fear of people who put content online that it won't be protected and others will use it in ways that is either unknown to the copyright holder or illegally. As the article points out, copyright infringement around the globe hurts everyone and new provisions and rules need to be put into place. It cost the movie industry an estimated $2.3 billion in revenues according to this study by Carl Horowitz of the NLPC.
God only knows what it did to other smaller individuals or companies outside the movie industry who have content online and have been trying to protect their work from Internet pirates.

So what are the best ways to protect someones content while it is on the Internet? Are normal people like us, outside of the big movie studios, very concerned about their content being pirated? I, for sure, know a few who are.

Click here to view the NLPC report and the 50 most pirated films on Google.