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MPAA Threatens To Disconnect Google From Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Over the last few months, Google has received more than 100 copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios. Most are directed at users of Google's public Wi-Fi service, but others are meant for Google employees. The MPAA is thus warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet. Although the copyright holders use strong language, these notices are simply warnings, and typically do not lead to legal action."
That Google disconnects the MPAA from existence.
I won't be sad the day the movie industry goes out of business. I've found other ways to find entertainment which does not involve them. Everything does not have to last forever.
No law is adequate, no business is more important, no constitutional right can supersede the wishes of the commercial content industry.
Wouldn't it be funny, though? Imagine if Google did this with others too: "Sorry, but we're not going to include results from people who are currently suing us. Don't shit where you eat!"
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
> No law is adequate, no business is more important, no constitutional right can supersede the wishes of the commercial content industry.
G'kar, I know your government did some sketchy things to raise money during the Earth-Mimbari war, but speaking for the MPAA? Dude, go back to the arms sales. Much more honorable.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Isn't there a term for this? 'Legal Battery' or something? I think if Lawyers could lose their licences to practice over pulling these kinds of stunts then they'd think twice before sending these letters out... or else expect to get paid in advance to do so.
May the Maths Be with you!
Would be amused to see all Google Search Results for MPAA point instead to pages on TPB and Demonoid. Spread that link juice around I say. :)
Huh?
So what you're saying here is that there's someone even better capable than Sony in spewing out nuclear-grade stupid? How exactly do they propose to remove Google from the Internet? That's like removing oxygen from the air in an instant. Actually, I have a suggestion for a better course of action for the MPAA: How about just going back to the business of just making decent movies and quit harassing folks entirely? That way, you get products out there people actually care about, and people don't cringe in anger every time they hear mention of your organization in the news. Just a thought.
I would like to see them try to take Google to court with their vaults of money instead of single mothers and college kids that can't afford to fight back.
Don't mess with Google, they will fuck you up.
REV 13:4
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's like a chihuahua barking at a tiger.
It doesn't accomplish much, but boy can that yipping drive you crazy!
http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/01/19/riaa-attorney-appointed-to-top-doj-position/id=1594/
when they made movies that were seen in cinema houses, which people bought tickets too. how quaint and historic
oh wait!
that's not history: the most profitable movie ever made, "avatar", just made a mint, less than a year ago, excluding all dvd sales. they made a massive profit in these quaint historic relics called "cinemas"
the cinema house is not a historic relic. it still works as a solid revenue generator and business model. i'm certain some strange gollum like creatures are happy watching movies alone in their cold basement on a 17 inch screen, but most of will go drive or walk to the cinema and pay to see movies, even with the cell phones and babies and expensive popcorn, its still a superior experience. they've even done sociological studies that all the oohs and aahs in the theatre alongside you in the dark heightens the movie going experience: we're social creatures, that someone else is crying or laughing or afraid heightens your enjoyment. it's the same sociology that drives people to go to church: shared emotional experience equals enjoyment (i know, this is probably the wrong website to talk about this social phenomenon)
cinemas, in other words, with the latest in IMAX tech, with their huge screens: you can't recreate that at home. cinema is a solid business. they said cinema houses were dead... in the 1950s. tv was supposed to kill them, it didn't. vhs tape was supposed to kill them, it didn't. and now the internet is supposed to kill the cinema. guess what: it's not. profits have been going up and up and up, no dvd sales, no internet streaming or cable deals needed
the mpaa is not protecting its existence, its protecting its dvd cash cow (which is already dying) and other cable deals/ internet ways to stream movies
but if they limited themselves to revenue just from theatres, and DID THEIR FUCKING JOB and protected the movie files form being pirated/ stolen from cinema houses... guess what? they would still make plenty of money to fund plenty of moviemaking from cinema houses. imagine that!
so basically: fuck you mpaa. stay in your cinema house, and don't mess with the internet. assholes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The questions is, who is secretly in possession of the Greater Wall of Lawyers (of +3 Litigation)?
You can send a letter saying anything you want, that letter in and of itself is irrelevant (with some extreme exceptions). I got a letter demand for cash from a lawyer who said my "corporate vail would be pierced" and I would have to pay him anyway. Point of fact, other then some attempts to slander me and a quick consult with the international law firm my liability insurance payed for (they take it very seriously) I never heard from that lawyer again.
They come in the dark, only in the darkest.
Just speculate for a minute - let's assume they pull their Evil Puppet String, call someone on the Purple Phone, and Voila, Google is faced with a cease and desist from doing business on the net. Just here in dreamland, suppose it is as easy as what Egypt pulled.
Would that be enough for the revolt to kick off real change? Would the frog finally notice it's been boiling?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
**AA hits the stack Last In First Out with a +8 Corruption.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Thank you MPAA for being stupid enough to poke the sleeping bear.
Finally you've picked a fight with someone big enough to defend themselves against your usual bully tactics.
I hope Google effortlessly disembowels you. It couldn't happen to a more deserving institution (other than the RIAA).
By what authority does the MPAA have the power to disconnect ANYONE from the internet?
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
No need to make up information there kid: Site removed from the Google index. I guess you are correct, everything is unfiltered and they do not touch any results. Next on iWitness news, Steve Jobs stops wearing turtlenecks
The world is how you make it
"Google has received more than 100 copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios. Most are directed at users of Google's public Wi-Fi service, but others are meant for Google employees
Is there a link to these MPAA infringement warnings addressed to Google employees?
Answer #1: Attention world please find attached a list of materials MPAA members or agents have directly released to the internet. We belive these are now considered free use to all.
Answer #2: Discovery request. The MPAA is requested to turn over all authorship and ownership rights documentation on all material the MPAA claims to have authority over. Note we are Google. We mean ALL. We will take paper napkins and scan them if needed. We want all physical mail and all email correspondence between the MPAA and members for the last 100 years or life of claimed copyright, which ever is longer. Note we are Google the amount of material is not a problem to us. Have a nice day.
Instead of fighting the MPAA, Google could replace the MPAA.
Google could approach each major studio and make a very clear case.
We control the disemination of information in a major way. We control the distribution of content in a major way. You haven't figured out the online model yet. And while the RIAA was busy chasing Napster, Apple came along with iTunes and took over the music industry. What if we decided to start purchasing the rights to distribute films, and completely eliminated your current distribution system?
We have the backbone to distribute them to theaters and invidual consumers just the same. And the people who would jump onboard first are the guys like James Cameron, Steve Speilberg, George Lucas, Chris Nolan, etc. that love to push innovation and new technology. The big blockbuster films that provide the bulk of your profit would disappear overnight.
Or you can beg right now to be kept in the loop and cut a similar deal with us now, where we allow you to continue to distribute to theaters and just use Google to help distribute to video on demand, Google TV, etc. in the future.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I read TFA and looks like they are quoting boilerplate. It is still funny, though.
More like a poodle yapping at the distant rural border of a sprawling empire. The seat of government is a thousand kilometers away, and the region around the dog is totally uninhabited.
When night falls it's total darkness with no artificial lights. A farmer barely hears wolves howling in the distance. In the morning the poodle is mysteriously gone. Seriously, IT is way way bigger than the movie industry. They can't shut down the entire internet for their own business interests.
This is more evidence that MPAA are thugs and they want to destroy the internet. Just because you want to destroy the internet, doesn't mean you can actually do it, or at least not without the help of a Republican president.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Google's response: removing all search results for MPAA-backed content. MPAA collapses. Job well done, boys. "Suicide by Google" is certainly an interesting way to finally snuff yourself out.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
On whose side, do you think?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
think it would look something like this for any movie title you tried to search for http://itslennysfault.com/stuff/IfMpaaSuesGoogle.jpg
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Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
Unfortunately... probably not. As much as I'd like to see Google launch an "the end justifies the means" campaign and crush MPAA, after some thought I got pessimistic about the prospect. Though theoretically Google could maybe buy all MPAA members one by one, Google is "new money" compared to it and the battle would be far, far from easy and predictable. After some amount of $$ it matters who you know, not how much you have.
-- Sig down
do you know how much they spent to make avatar? and they made a huge profit
someone, the producers and investors, have to put up a lot of money to make a movie, you are correct. but that's their risk, not mine. if the movie does good, they reap a windfall of profit. good for them. if the movie bombs, well too bad, i owe them nothing, and there's no valid argument where we owe them anything. if they think they can reduce their risk by destroying the internet, fuck them
a business is a business is a business: you invest, and reap a reward, or you don't. that's the business of movie making, and it should not in anyway be anything but exactly that sort of speculative endeavour. fucking with how the internet works in order to guarantee them a profit? for movies that might be bad? no, no fucking way
you are not guaranteed anything just because you tried to make a movie
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Remember, Sony (Sony Pictures) is a member of the MPAA. The MPAA is a collective of companies that are not only capable of spewing out nuclear-grade stupid, but also in getting people in powerful positions to believe them. That's why people cringe in anger instead of responding in anger.
And in other news, Google decides to disconnect the MPAA from the internet.
*I don't think GE's a member anymore, but it's impossible to know for certain how much of their revenue came just from NBC-Universal
Really?
Page 34 of GE's 2009 earnings report: Revenues, NBC Universal, $15,436,000,000; Segment Profit, NBC Universal, $2,264,000,000.
Yeah, it's impossible to know for certain that NBC-Universal made $2 billion in profit last year. Sony Pictures, by the way, collected ¥705,237,000,000 (~ $8 billion) in revenue for FY 2010, and only ¥42,814,000,000 (~ $519 million) in profit; Sony Pictures includes not only MPAA-relevant stuff but TV shows just like NBC-Universal. That's from SONY's annual earnings report, which is admittedly not the first Google result, but whatever, it wasn't that hard to find. (http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/2010/index.html)
When you consider how little of Sony or GE's total revenues have to do with their movie-making divisions, and how much Google's revenues are based on Internet services supposedly threatened by these letters (practically all of Google's revenue) I think you can easily realize how much more money Google would be willing to spend on a fight than the MPAA. That is, if these angry letters Google received had any real meaning other than to try to scare the individuals who usually receive them.
You accidentally the noun.
And while the MPAA collapses, Microsoft and Yahoo form a partnership and launche an aggressive "We don't censor your search results!" campaign, and lots of people just start using Bing and Yahoo, rather than get embroiled in a pissing contest between two big drunks who are both upwind. Meanwhile, MPAA and their lackeys all stop using and dealing with people who advertise via Google (the movie & recording industries generally have pretty big marketing budgets, in case you didn't notice). Ad revenues plummet just as Google has to begin spending lots of money on developing automated methods to scrub search results of any "MPAA-backed" materials. Net result: Google has also committed "suicide by Google!"
The government steps in, declares the movie studios AND Google to both be "too big to fail," and bails them out at taxpayer expense.
Yeah, that would be an awesome scenario. Seriously, I can't wait to see them come to blows, rather than work out their issues like fucking adults.
if they lose google, bing will stop working.
I don't know...imagine if Google, MSFT, and Apple got together and decided to kill them bastards dead and split the media access evenly amongst themselves? Google might not be able to do it solo, but you put those three together? They could do it. Apple could load iTunes to the brim, Google TV wouldn't have anymore BS, and MSFT would make the X360 a hell of an entertainment center. And all three in the past have been pissed off or pissed on by the MPAA or its members.
So I'd say its doable, but you'd really need Gates and Jobs back at the helm, because I don't see Ballmer and Cook having the stones. Page and Brin probably do though.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Whoosh! You need to get abreast of the subtle joke...
Google could divide and conquer by buying a considerable chunk of the entertainment industry.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And in other news, Google decides to disconnect the MPAA from the internet.
A far more possible scenario - unless the MPAA are that far in bed with DHS.
I don't know about 'in bed', but they're certainly in the same room at the orgy party.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."