Sued by Google, a State Attorney General Retreats

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Attorney General Jim Hood of Mississippi on Friday agreed to call a “time out” in his fight with Google after the Internet giant filed a lawsuit accusing him of conspiring with the movie industry.

The move by Mr. Hood, who has been one Google’s most outspoken critics, came only hours after the company asserted in its lawsuit that Mr. Hood had been improperly influenced by major Hollywood studios that are trying to crack down on the distribution of pirated movies on the Internet.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Mississippi, had also questioned the authority of state law enforcement officials to regulate Internet service providers.

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Mr. Hood issued a 79-page subpoena in October, asking that the company turn over information about its search engine and sales of illegal drugs, pornography and other materials. He suggested that the company was knowingly profiting from such sales and demanded a response from Google by early January.

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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/technology/google-attorney-general-jim-hood-lawsuit.html

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By ERIC LIPTON and CONOR DOUGHERTY DEC. 19, 2014

[friendly_iconoclast]

1. Hood was part and parcel of Project Goliath, and was outed via the Sony leaks

http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/18/7417751/documents-in-sony-leak-show-state-attorney-general-was-cozy-with-hollywood/in/7166326

Documents in Sony leak show how state attorney general was cozy with Hollywood

By Russell Brandom on December 18, 2014 04:52 pm


At the end of last week, we dug up news of Project Goliath, a secret Hollywood project to investigate and discredit Google on issues of copyright and web freedom. But while the documents showed how bad things had gotten between Google and Hollywood, they also showed how eagerly many state attorneys general took up the MPAA’s anti-Google crusade – particularly Mississippi’s Jim Hood. And less than a week after the documents were made public, that eagerness is starting to have real consequences.

Hood has been at the center of many of the recent legal actions against Google in the US, investigating the company for involvement in both pharmaceutical counterfeiting and content piracy, but never assembling enough evidence for concrete charges. But on Tuesday, The New York Times revealed the MPAA may have had more of a hand in his actions than he let on. According to Times documents, a November 2013 letter Hood wrote criticizing Google for aiding piracy was almost entirely copied from text provided to him by lawyers working for the MPAA. In short, Hood’s lips were moving, but it was the MPAA’s approved text coming out.

Other emails show specific requests from Hood circulating among MPAA lawyers. In an email sent on January 16th, a few days before a scheduled meeting between Google and a group of attorneys general, MPAA counsel Vans Stevenson discusses which supporting documents they can provide to Hood and the other AGs in advance...

...Taken together with other documents, it makes a strong case that Hood was being directed by both the MPAA and Microsoft in his investigations into Google, and casts many of those investigations in a new light.

[christx30]

3. Good that he was exposed from Sony.

Name and shame.

[DeSwiss]

5. The MPAA and these state Attorneys General.....

...working together? Like in a conspiracy?

- Now that's a movie I'd watch if it involves jailtime for the perps......

K&R

Hey MPAA!

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[Dustlawyer]

2. Hood is nothing but an ambitious sell out, easily intimidated and over his head.

He blustered a lot about going after BP in the early years of the BP Deepwater Horizon. We met with him and gave him the best of the dirty docs in our repository (we have 7 million). Shortly after he shut up on the issue. To date, none of the Gulf states have been paid for billions in lost sales tax revenue and all of the governors of these states are doing NOTHING! Of course the are all Republicans.
We asked these governors to come speak, or at least attend a conference of the trial lawyers sueing BP to try to work together to speed things up and overcome all of the money BP has spread around the political and media environs. None bothered to even respond! I am sure BP got to them too, need to check who funded their last re-election campaigns.

[cosmicone]

4. Good. Now Google can crush him. n/t

[marble falls]

6. A pox on both their houses. If the NSA is ever privatized google would be the obvious choice.