National Legal and Policy Center Releases 'Top 50' List of Potentially Copyright Infringing Movies and Other Programs Hosted on Google Video

National Legal and Policy Center Releases 'Top 50' List of Potentially Copyright Infringing Movies and Other Programs Hosted on Google Video

FALLS CHURCH, Va., July 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On the heels of pirated copies of Michael Moore's Sicko and Universal's Evan Almighty being hosted on Google Video before or days after their scheduled releases, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) today launched a "Top 50" list ( http://www.nlpc.org/view.asp?action=viewArticle&aid=2082 ) of other full length movies, cable programs and music concerts that are hosted on Google Video potentially without the copyright owner's knowledge or permission.

The Top 50 list includes the name of the movie or program, the production company, the number of days the content has been hosted on the video sharing site and the number of viewers. All content in the Top 50 list was active as recently as Monday, July 9th 2007.

"We realize that this is probably a 'drop in the bucket' in ferreting out copyrighted content among the millions of videos posted on Google Video, YouTube and other popular video sites, but we hope that our efforts both raise awareness of the issue of video and music piracy and hopefully serve as a resource for copyright owners to check if their content is on the sites without their knowledge or approval," said National Legal and Policy Center's Chairman Ken Boehm.

While movies like Sicko and Evan Almighty were removed from Google Video (although Sicko was again being hosted on the site as of Monday morning July 9th) Warner Brothers' hits like Blood Diamond (2006), Columbia's Spiderman III (2007), Oscar winner Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and Disney features like Meet the Robinson's and Cars are all still available. NLPC plans to update the Top 50 list periodically with new potentially infringing content. While NLPC has chosen not to post the actual links to the potentially infringing content so as to not contribute further to intellectual property theft, screenshots of all of the content will be included and links to the content will be shared with members of the media and copyright owners if requested.

"It's difficult to know for sure whether all of the content included in the Top 50 list is being hosted in violation of copyright laws -- NLPC makes no assertions -- but it's a reasonable assumption that much of the content has been uploaded without the copyright owner's knowledge or approval," added Boehm. "Some of the content may be appropriate but it's a safe bet that content companies don't know or approve of blockbusters like Blood Diamond or recent releases like 300 being readily available on the video sharing sites," said Boehm.

Recently Google has come under increased scrutiny for allowing allegedly copyrighted material to be posted on its video sharing sites. The company faces numerous lawsuits from copyright owners and this past March became the subject of a $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom alleging that Google/YouTube had been willfully infringing copyrights on a huge scale for allegedly hosting more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's copyrighted programs. While the company has been promising for months that it will soon release a new system for copyright owners to remove allegedly infringing files, many smaller companies have already developed automated copyright filtration processes. Late last month, TorrentSpy announced that its website will no longer require

DMCA take down notices to be filed by copyright owners before links to copyrighted material are removed.

"Google has been dragging its feet for months in coming up with a solution to pirated content and still requires copyright owners to go through the laborious process of issuing DMCA take down notices before the content is removed while smaller companies are beginning to show real leadership on this issue. The content in our first Top 50 list has been hosted on Google Video for an average of 168 days, so its obvious to us that they are not taking this seriously. We hope that by making this database available at the very least we might be able to shame Google into policing itself and removing copyrighted content it does not own and has no right to include on its sites," said Boehm.

The National Legal and Policy Center is a not-for-profit organization focused on ethics and accountability in public life and private business. The organization is a strong supporter of intellectual property rights and believes that enforceable property rights are the basis of any functioning market economy.

Source: National Legal and Policy Center

CONTACT: Ken Boehm of National Legal and Policy Center, +1-703-237-1970,
kboehm@nlpc.org; Kari Scott, +1-703-683-5004 x128,
kscott@crcpublicrelations.com, for National Legal and Policy Center

Web site:

http://www.nlpc.org/

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