What is “Goliath” and why are Hollywood’s most powerful lawyers working to kill it?
Leaked emails from the hack against Sony show that major movie companies are working together with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) on a project aimed to stop a company known as “Goliath.”
It’s pretty clear they’re referring to Google.
From Hollywood’s perspective, Goliath is enabling piracy online. Hollywood’s goal appears to be blocking access to pirated movies.
In dozens of recently leaked emails from the Sony hack, lawyers from the MPAA and six major studios talk about “Goliath” as their most powerful and politically relevant adversary in the fight against online piracy. They speak of “the problems created by Goliath,” and worry “what Goliath could do if it went on the attack.” Together they mount a multi-year effort to “respond to / rebut Goliath’s public advocacy” and “amplify negative Goliath news.” And while it’s hard to say for sure, significant evidence suggests that the studio efforts may be directed against Google.
At the beginning of this year, the MPAA and six studios — Universal, Sony, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Disney — joined together to begin a new campaign against piracy on the web. A January 25th email lays out a series of legally and technically ambitious new tools, including new measures that would block infringing sites from reaching customers of many major ISPs.
“We start from the premise that site blocking is a means to an end,” says MPAA general counsel Steven Fabrizio. “There may be other equally effective measures ISPs can take, and that they might be more willing to take voluntarily.” According to the email, the group has retained its own technical experts and is working with Comcast (which owns Universal) to develop techniques for blocking or identifying illegally shared files in transit.
Their strategy also has political risks. “In the post-SOPA world, we need to consider the extent to which a strategy presents a risk of a public relations backlash,” Fabrizio continues, “whether a strategy might invigorate and galvanize the anti-copyright forces we saw in the SOPA debates.” SOPA, also known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, proposed ambitious new site-blocking measures in 2011, but was ultimately defeated by coordinated outcry from web companies and their users. The new emails suggest Hollywood hasn’t given up on the idea.
The only thing standing in their way? Goliath.
The MPAA’s venture is referred to over and over as “Project Goliath,” an effort to take Goliath down, with each studio contributing funds towards a project that will benefit them all. One telling email — titled “Goliath data summary” — comes with an attachment titled “Search Engine Piracy Discussion (MPAA Discussion),” seeming to suggest the codename is a stand-in for Google. A number of Goliath-related emails also point to examples of copyright-infringing search results found on Google; the persistence of file-sharing links in Google search rankings has been a sore point in Hollywood for years.
Enter, the lawyers…
Lawyers, and state attorney generals no less. You know (or you should know) just how antiquated lawyers are on the topic of Internet freedom of information. Every time corporate lawyers, and our legislature, insert themselves into Internet copyright laws technical advances in eCommerce (not to mention our free market system) are suffocated just a bit more. It’s not that they’re just over their heads. It’s that their only purpose is to protect the clients’ legacy dominance in the market. Allowing technology to advance is simply counter productive.
The emails reveal a multi-pronged approach to defeating Goliath. One tactic is legal, convincing state prosecutors to take up the fight against Goliath. After a series of meetings at the National Association of Attorneys General in February, MPAA counsel Fabrizio writes, “Goliath has told the AGs to pound sand…they pretty clearly told the AGs that they aren’t going to do anything and essentially threatened the AGs with the possibility of attacking them as they attacked folks in DC during SOPA. The AGs did not like that.” As a result, the counsels report a growing coalition of attorneys general willing to take action against Goliath, and the group budgeted $500,000 a year towards providing legal support. Much of that budget went towards retaining the prestigious law firm Jenner & Block, specifically Jenner partner and former US Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, who has billed the group for as much as $40,000 a month.
The fight against Goliath also has an investigative side. Other emails describe a proposed project called Keystone — budgeted at $70,000 — devoted to gathering enough evidence against Goliath to provoke further action by the state attorneys general. “There is only so far we can get with the AG’s unless we develop better evidence and intelligence against Goliath,” an email reads, “and that is the budget for Keystone.”
Does it get any more shady?
It took Napster breaking all the rules before the music industry woke up to realize driving across town to a record store every time you wanted to buy an album was primitive. Motion picture producers are still attempting to cling to the past with by exerting control, as the Sony email leak illustrates. Meanwhile, ticket sales in theaters continue to fall.
Can we all agree on what Project Goliath means to the Internet?
This is a horrible threat to the Internet as a means to a free market system. Google is simply displaying pages of websites some ham-and-egg geek created in their spare time. The MPAA would much rather Google block all these small sites, in order to dominate the Google feed and what is listed. Giving you, the average joe nothing more than what some lawyer says you should see. It should be apparent how stifling, and dangerous, this is to Internet freedom.
Don’t fear for the future of Google – the Goliath. Fear for yourselves. One day Google will flick a switch and fix the problem. If not, these lawyers will convince the attorney general to just regulate what your ISP allows you to view. Easy enough. You, on the other hand, will have to forever view only what some lawyer deems appropriate. And, that literally hundreds of thousands of websites are purposefully put out of your reach. If you then make your own website, or have one now, you’ll also be blocked if you have a single bit of content not deemed OK by these lawyers. Meanwhile, huge technological advances in how you view movies will not develop since the MPAA has locked us into obsolete means of delivering their product.
Netflix ONLY exists because production companies were pushed into the next century with consumer demands. Think of what could happen next…or we can just keep driving to the video store.
