Brandon Drury and Luke Sample, the owners of EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com, are currently being sued by several Hollywood studios. How does Google fit in? The two men said in sworn statements that Google received $809,000 for advertising on their sites after the search giant offered the duo credit as an easy start to advertise on Google"s search engine and suggested keywords such as "bootleg movie download," "pirated," and "download harry potter movie." Many media companies, including News Corp., Viacom, Sony, NBC Universal, Time Warner and Walt Disney, have filed complaints demanding that the Mountain View company pull all support for sites promoting illegal activity.
Google isn"t being accused of piracy, but media companies aren"t exactly joyous about the issue. In a conference call last week, lawyers for both sides agreed on the removal of certain ads and created a list of approved advertisers. Google is to refrain from selling keywords used by rogue sites to lure users to pirated material and says that it is working on ways to screen out ads that violate the company"s policies. A spokesman for Sony Pictures said, "Discussions with Google have been ongoing for a while, and there"s hope it can result in a mutually satisfactory arrangement whereby Google will not give support to pirate sites." That means hopefully no more warez ads on Neowin - no more excuses when breaking the forum rules.