By Gina Keating
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -
The Motion Picture Association of
America on Thursday sued Pullmylink
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, which owns video sharing
site YouTube.
"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 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
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