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Opinion

Companies should not benefit from piracy

Eva Kaminskayte
Opinion Columnist

Google is facing criticism from media companies such as News Corporation, Viacom, Disney and Time Warner for helping two Web sites that are accused of promoting movie piracy, CNNMoney.com reported. 

The two Web sites in question, EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com, are in hot water for letting users search for movies on the Internet that they can download for free onto their hard drives. 

Both of these sites receive heavy traffic and attracted the attention of Google, which assigned account representatives to the sites "who suggested keywords they could bid on, including ‘bootleg movie download,' ‘pirated,' and ‘download harry potter movie'," CNNMoney.com reported.

To make arguments against the company worse, Brandon Drury and Luke Sample, the owners of the sites accused of promoting film piracy, received considerable support from Google between 2003 and 2005, CNNMoney.com reported.

Google was also paid $809,000 for advertisements placed by the two sites over the three-year period. Interestingly enough, Google is not a defendant in the pirating case against the two sites.

What's really fishy is that according to CNNMoney's report, "Google also offered Drury and Sample credit so they didn't have to use their credit cards to pay Google's fees although it isn't clear if the offer was accepted." 

Google's main purpose is to help people find what they are looking for online, which is technically what it was doing in these cases -- helping people find movies -- but Google should not be profiting from illegal actions. 

The uproar over intellectual property comes as no surprise, especially after Google's recent purchase of the YouTube video site for $1.65 billion. Issues with sites like YouTube will be a lot harder to handle than the current pirating issues against Drury and Sample. Users post videos themselves, and in addition to personal videos it's possible to find movie clips (even from movies that have yet to be released) and entire episodes of TV shows -- many of which are sold on DVD. 

In the fine print of YouTube's user agreement (which most people ignore or simply don't follow) the site forbids the posting of copyrighted materials and reserves the right to terminate a user's account and to remove the content.

Monitoring every single video on YouTube is practically impossible, and people will post illegally copied or obtained property and make it available to everyone no matter what the rules state. 

It makes sense from a user's perspective, as many people don't want to pay for something that originally aired on television for free, but there are many people who lose money because of pirating. While sympathy for the affected isn't enough to stop most, there are laws against pirating and consequences for the offenders.

Movies, TV shows and other types of media are much more readily accessible to the masses than they were years ago when pirating was mostly done by super-savvy computer users. Proper use of copyrighted material is always a sticky subject, especially online where there are many ways to copy the material and acquire it for personal use. 

Ultimately, it is up to the companies involved to monitor for illegal activity to the best of their ability, and they should not encourage sites with monetary incentives when they know that those sites are promoting illegal actions. Those who do should suffer the consequences.

Kaminskayte, a public relations/political science senior, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu