Google accused of profiting from video pirates

“According to a Wall Street Journal report, a set of media giants that includes News Corp., Viacom, Sony, NBC Universal, Time Warner, and Disney are accusing Google of being in cahoots with DVD pirates by virtue of the AdSense relationship with two sites whose owners stand accused of inducing others to infringe copyright. Brandon Drury and Luke Sample ran EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com, both AdSense partners, from 2003 to 2005, offering a repackaged BitTorrent client and access to a P2P search system. According to the Journal, documents in a related civil suit show that when AdSense noticed high traffic to the sites, it assigned an account representative, who helpfully suggested the site owners buy search engine advertising on queries such as “bootleg movie download,” “pirated” and “download harry potter movie.” Google was paid more than $800,000 for the ads. The Journal reports that Google execs huddled with studio reps on a conference call Friday to reiterate their policy against ads promoting piracy and promise additional steps, including removing certain ads, creating a list of approved advertisers and stopping the sale of piratey-sounding keywords.”