MPAA Threatened To Disconnect Google

Within recent months, Google has been reported to receive dozens of copyright infringement notifications from the MPAA-affiliated film studios. Although such warnings are largely directed at users of the company’s public Wi-Fi service, some of them still seem to be directed at employees located at its headquarters. The warning letters say that the entertainment industry is unhappy and notifies Google that it might get disconnected from the web.

The largest movie studios and record labels constantly send out thousands of notifications to users alleged of sharing their copyrighted content through BitTorrent networks. Such notices are only meant to inform of wrongdoing, working as follows. The rights owner hires some firm to track down Internet users sharing certain files on file-sharing networks. Such firms simply join the swarm and request these files from others. After having someone sharing a piece of the file with them, the company logs the IP-address, look up the Internet service provider and automatically send it a warning.

While major part of the warnings is sent out to the largest broadband providers, asking to forward them to the users in question, Google also appears receiving quite a few. Over a hundred of those automated messages have been sent to the search giant within the past several months.

As the company offers Wi-Fi hotspots in some places, the infringers usually don’t actually share content directly from Google’s headquarters, but some of the notices do appear to be aimed at the company’s employees. This is, at least, a very awkward situation for a search giant trying to help out the copyright holders by implementing a censorship policy towards some of the BitTorrent-related terms. It may sound funny, but Google runs the risk of losing its Internet connection, as the movie companies believe that copyright violation also means a violation of Google’s ISP’s terms of service and should cause a disconnection from the Internet.

A few of the warnings sent to Google’s headquarters are published on ChillingEffects, so it’s not clear whether the search giant has forwarded them to employees or not. Meanwhile, the most recent warnings received by Google have been sent on behalf of Columbia Pictures and Paramount Pictures for the illegal sharing of “The Green Hornet” and “The Fighter” accordingly. On the whole, the search giant has published over twenty of these notifications in the last month.