Should search engine giants like Google be more selective when accepting advertising customers and try to keep out those associated with piracy?
That is what some indie filmmakers believe should be happening. Ellen Seidler, a filmmaker who is frustrated by the widespread piracy of her work, recently spoke out regarding the issue.
"These sites want to make money. They want to drive traffic to their site and they do it by pirating films. They are paid for the ads on their site by Google and others. What we need to do is force Google to be more vigilant in preventing filmmakers from getting ripped off," Seidler told CNET.com. "I don't think it's good to demonize the little guys."
Seidler released her film, “And Then Came Lola” to DVD in April of this year and found a pirated copy online in the first 24 hours. In five months there have been 20,000 identified links to more unauthorized copies. She believes that increasing Google’s responsibility to keep piracy at bay is a better tactic than filing mass lawsuits, which seems to be the current trend in the industry.
Google, however, says that the company is doing everything within their power under current copyright law to protect media creators from such issues.
"We've long had in place a policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," A Google spokesperson said in a statement. "For AdSense publishers, if we receive a notice of infringement, we may disable their participation in AdSense in accordance with the DMCA process."
I don’t know that it would even be possible for Google to monitor every customer for infringement violations and, even if they could, should it really be their responsibility to do so? Ethically, it would be a great practice to institute, but it seems like it would be extremely costly, complicated, and likely not at all realistic. I definitely feel for these filmmakers, but I’m just not sure that putting the responsibility on Google is the answer.
