Brandon Drury and Luke Sample, who own the now non-operational EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com, found themselves faced with legal action from major movie studios after they allowed users to search for and download movies free of charge using their websites. Drury and Sample bought advertisements that would display when users searched for a range of keywords, including "pirated" and "bootleg movie download", between 2003 and 2005 at a cost of $809,000.
Google, who recently acquired the popular video sharing site YouTube, has been working closely with Hollywood studios in order to remove copyrighted material that does not have explicit permission to be made available on the site. Google were reported to have put $200m aside in order to fight lawsuits aimed at YouTube after the search engine purchased the site late last year.
In a conference call with studio representatives last Friday, Google lawyers said that Google would remove any advertisements that the studios objected to and would also create a list of approved advertisers, in addition to abstaining from selling advertisements on keywords that could allow users to find and download pirated and other illegal material.
A spokesperson for Google stated:
"Hundreds of thousands of advertisers responsibly abide by our ad content policies and we're committed to preventing those who don't from using our program."
Google are also working on internal guidelines which will focus on monitoring certain keyword advertisements, as well as training their advertising sales team on how to avoid the sale of contentious ad placements.
