[Infowarrior] - MPAA Decides Pullmylink.com Doesn't Have Enough Publicity

[Richard Forno]

MPAA accuses Pullmylink.com of aiding movie piracy
Thu Apr 17, 2008 8:37pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1720278020080418

By Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Motion Picture Association of America on
Thursday sued Pullmylink.com, a Web site featuring links to free -- and
allegedly pirated -- movies and TV shows, claiming the site promotes and
profits from copyright infringement.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles federal court, is the seventh action filed
by the MPAA against content aggregators in the United States since late last
year and is part of a larger anti-piracy campaign that included a criminal
raid on the UK headquarters of one such site, TV Links.

The campaign against sites that link to, but do not host, illegal content
has raised some eyebrows with critics asking why the association doesn't go
after the host sites or Internet search engines such as Google.com, which
owns video sharing site YouTube.com.

"Is the message that it's less criminal to host illegal content on YouTube
than it is to link to it from a site such as TV Links?" Guardian technology
columnist Jack Schofield wrote in the wake of the MPAA-directed raid on TV
Links in October. "In future, do I risk being thrown in the slammer for
linking directly to a YouTube video?"

The MPAA, which represents Hollywood's major studios in government affairs,
has obtained settlements or resolutions in the six other cases against Web
aggregators of video content. It plans to continue its aggressive pursuit of
new sites using "a variety of techniques" to force them to hand back profits
made from advertising, anti-piracy director John Malcolm said.

The association has talked with Google and other search engines, as well as
Chinese user-generated content sites that host many of the videos, to try to
have traffic directed away from the infringing content and to have it taken
down quicker, Malcolm said.

"We think these companies are good corporate actors (and) we engage with
them in other ways," Malcolm said. "You can't equate a legitimate search
vendor ... with somebody who is making a lot of money off the backs of
creative artists."

The MPAA says piracy, including Web postings of camcorded and unlicensed
content, cost the U.S. film industry $18.2 billion in lost profits in 2005,
including $7 billion from Internet piracy.

Pullmylink.com sees 12,000 visitors a day who view more than 39,000 pages of
content, including movies that are still in theaters and cable television
shows.

The site recently featured links to streamed copies of the feature films
"Stop-Loss," "21" and "The Other Boleyn Girl", which have not yet been
released to DVD, as well as the cable TV series "The Tudors," "Entourage,"
and "Rome" and many broadcast TV series.

It also carried advertisements by online movie rental company Netflix Inc. A
Netflix spokesman said the company buys its online ads in bulk and was not
aware that one had ended up on pullmylinks.com.

Malcolm said the MPAA was exploring "the whole issue of (online) ad brokers"
as another avenue for choking off revenue to illegal streaming and download
sites.

(Editing by Braden Reddall)