Google and Hollywood Return to Bickering Over SOPA

[CosaNostra]

The Stop Online Piracy Act, an anti-piracy bill that would have granted the US government and private corporations extraordinary power to battle copyright infringement on the web, failed to pass in 2012. But according to emails uncovered by the recent Sony hack and recent news stories, the movie industry is still fighting to revive the bill, even pushing Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to make life uncomfortable for Google, one of the bill’s biggest detractors. And Google isn’t too happy about it.

On Friday, the search giant filed legal papers in federal court against Hood, requesting that the court stop his demands for information from the company. The move came a day after the company had unloaded a rather pointed blog post complaining about apparent efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America to revive SOPA and push an investigation of Google through Hood’s office.

It’s a complicated situation, and it shows just how fierce the battle was—and is—over SOPA. With movie industry lobbyists behind it, SOPA pushed for new ways of removing pirated movies and other content from the net. But internet companies fought hard to stop the thing, saying it would legalize online censorship. In 2012, over 115,000 websites—including WIRED, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Reddit—altered their pages in some way to protest the SOPA bill, with many of them voluntarily going dark. Millions of Americans also sent emails complaining about SOPA, and Google collected 7 million signatures for an online petition protesting the bill.

And still the fight goes on. According to a recent story from The Verge, hacked Sony emails showed that the Motion Picture Association of America and six major studios have joined forces to revive the SOPA legislation. The studios budgeted $500,000 to pay lawyers, The Verge reports, and the MPAA set aside an additional $1.17 million for the campaign.

According to a later story from The New York Times, the MPAA instructed its law firm, Jenner & Block, to attack Google specifically. As The Times reports, the MPAA pitched Mississippi State Attorney General Hood, and Hood delivered a letter to Google making various accusations against the company, with most of it ghost-written by Jenner & Block.

In October, Hood also sent Google a 79-page subpoena demanding 141 documents and 62 interviews from Google, as well as anything that might be construed as “dangerous content†on Google’s network. And this is what Google is trying to stop. “In order to respond to the subpoena in full, Google would have to produce millions of documents at great expense and disruption to its business,†Google’s suit reads.

For Sherwin Siy, vice president of Legal Affairs for Washington, D.C.-based public interest group Public Knowledge, the subpoena sets a bad precedent. “The MPAA may have asked an attorney general to go after Google,†he says. “What happens when the MPAA is worried about a smaller entity? Maybe they won’t even need a state AG, they could send some other complaint and get a service that is actually legal to shut down because they just can’t afford to deal with it.â€