Google Suggesting Piracy is Legit

After finding out that Apple had introduced iTunes Movie Rentals yesterday, Haochi of googlified.com sought some statistics that would compare online movie piracy to the legal downloads from movie stores like Amazon Unbox and iTunes Store. He came across the Google suggestion that perhaps piracy IS in fact legit.

There’s no point in beating around the bush, the screenshot of the same query on the left pretty much says it all, but I do want to emphasize that there’s no way that it should have been allowed to appear there as far as I’m concerned. I think there should be a filter set up to block such "suggestions," else somebody not paying that much attention or just skimming the page might gather the wrong idea.

Google is known to have had ongoing legal battles and problems because of the content it hosts on its video sharing service, the all too well known by now YouTube. That makes it even more difficult to believe that "movie piracy is legit" is being displayed. Ok, I understand that there’s nobody responsible for it, but as I just said, a filter against similar suggestions would have been mighty fine at this point. Not just because of the above, but also because of some similar structured queries people might input in the Search box.

The numbers about movie piracy seem frightening in their magnitude: supposedly 2005 piracy cost the movie industry about 7 billion dollars according to the MPAA. I don’t know about you, but when I’m thinking about the number of zeroes I get chills running down my spine. If you’d care to find out more about piracy there’s an excellent study, conducted by LEK, that says that 80 percent of the lost money resulted from piracy in other countries other than the United States, only the remaining 20 percent being lost inside its borders.