While the opportunity for US-based copyright holders to easily block foreign 'pirate' sites was temporarily thwarted with the death of SOPA, the MPAA has been busy making other plans to achieve the same goals. However, following a Court of Appeals ruling handed down yesterday, one of those options now appears to be off the table.
Hoping to find out more about the collaboration between the MPAA and Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood, Google recently requested a deposition of MPAA lead counsel Steve Fabrizio. This week the Hollywood group told the court that the request goes too far, claiming that Google is using the legal process to uncover its anti-piracy strategies.
The MPAA has repeatedly urged Google to get tougher on copyright infringement, but recently it learned that anti-piracy efforts also have a downside. Several pages from the MPAA's search engine for movies and TV-shows "WhereToWatch" have been removed from Google's search results, following inaccurate takedown requests from movie companies.
One of my blogpost also get removed from Google search queries with the same keywords.
During December five men from the UK received sentences totaling 17 years after leaking thousands of movies onto the Internet. In an earlier article we revealed how the men were tracked down. Today we'll look more closely at what police and the Federation Against Copyright Theft were looking for when the men were raided.
