Want To See The Latest Movies For Free? Use Google Video, Complains Watch Group

Jul 11, 2007 at 10:07am ET by Barry Schwartz

Watchdog group flags top pirated films on Google Video from News.com covers a report by the National Legal & Policy Center named Is Google Promoting Video Piracy?

In this report, they documented fifty cases of movies and other copyrighted material being uploaded and accessible via Google Video for free. Some examples include Spiderman III, 300 and Meet the Robinsons, and those are just movies from this year.

The group asks why Google can’t block such videos when rival services such as MySpace, TorrentSpy, DailyMotion and Break.com can:

The argument that they cannot block pirated content because of technological or financial reasons is laughable.

About a month ago, we reported the YouTube Video ID Tool is almost ready for release. But I have not heard much since then about the new tool. Will this tool solve Google’s problems?

NLPC’s initial top 50 list was selected and ranked based on a combination of how popular a work is and how many views it had. Harry Potter & The Globlet Of Fire topped the list, being posted in 2005 and having 165,000 views. The French-dubbed version of Miami Vice is sixth on the list, posted in 2006 and having only 663 views.

Postscript: Google gave me a statement:

For all of the content we host – whether from premium content providers or creative end-users – we require the content provider to hold all necessary rights to the material. We cooperate with copyright holders to identify and promptly remove any infringing content. Of course, no system is bulletproof.

As a company that respects the rights of copyright holders, we will continue to take the lead in providing state-of-the-art DMCA tools and processes for all copyright holders.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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