I haven't really gave the Sony email leaks much attention, but today I stumbled across this and I think it deserves a lot of attention. It seems some of the leaked emails from the Sony Pictures hack have revealed how deep the MPAA and Sony hate google. These emails are now raising questions about how the MPAA abuses the legal process in corrupt and dangerous ways. The most serious charge, is that it appears the MPAA and the major Hollywood studios directly funded various state Attorneys General in their efforts to attack and shame Google...... Let that sink in for a minute.
MPAA Paying Off Elected Officials to Attack Google
Google has been a popular target for some state Attorney Generals. The state Attorney General with the biggest chip on his shoulder for Google has absolutely been Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who seemed to think that it was Google's fault that he could find counterfeit goods via search. A few months later, he was back blaming Google for infringement online as well.
What has come out of the Sony Pictures Leak is not just that the MPAA was "friending" state Attorney Generals, but that the MPAA was funding some of this activity and actively supporting the investigation. The leaked emails reveal that rather than seeing that NY Times article about corporate/AG corruption as a warning sign, the MPAA viewed it as a playbook. But not for preventing investigations but for encouraging and funding them. This appears to go way beyond that NY Times article. This isn't campaign donations or inviting AGs to speak at lavish events and paying for the travel. This is flat out paying AGs to investigate Google (even on issues unrelated to copyright infringement) and then promising to get extra press attention to those articles.
Hopefully you have read the above and have an idea of what is going on here. The MPAA is not just a group a good guys who put ratings on films or try to better the industry. They have grown into a "Goliath" that is all about killing creativity and making money. They have created a service that is unneeded and forced it on the the people. The MPAA has never and will never stand for the betterment of anything, they will only stand for profit and killing innovation. This is bigger than copyrights and piracy, this could potentially censor the internet that we use so freely.
Yet it isn't just the MPAA that is at the helm of this thing. The MPAA, Comcast and a handful of studios want to block your access to what they don't like. Yes it will start with piracy, but where will it end? Look at how they talk about bending the current laws to fit their needs:
We now know what they don't want us to know and now it's up to us to make sure it doesn't happen. Forewarned is forearmed...
SCOPE We have traditionally thought of site blocking in the US as a DMCA 512(j) issue. In some ways, that is too narrow and we plan to expand our scope of inquiry on two levels. First, DMCA 512(j), by its terms, necessarily creates an adversarial relationship with the target ISP (and more generally with the ISP community). We have been exploring theories under the All Writs Acts, which, unlike DMCA 512(j), would allow us to obtain court orders requiring site blocking without first having to sue and prove the target ISPs are liable for copyright infringement. This may open up avenues for cooperative arrangements with ISPs. Second, we start from the premise that site blocking is a means to an end (the end being effective measures by ISPs to prevent infringement through notorious pirate sites). There may be other equally effective measures ISPs can take, and that they might be more willing to take voluntarily. Our intention is to work with our own retained experts and Comcast (and MPAA’s Technology group) to identify and study these other possibilities, as well as US site blocking technical issues.
Source:
The Verge