Google Asks Court to Dismiss Lawsuit Claims Accusing the Tech Giant of Profiting from Piracy

• Google is dealing with a lawsuit accusing Alphabet Inc. of profiting from Google ads that promote pirate websites.
• Several well-regarded publishers allege the tech giant knowingly supports the promotion of copyright-infringing sellers.
• However, most of their claims may be dismissed in court, even though they are basically true.

Prominent textbook publishers filed a lawsuit in June at a New York federal court accusing Google of promoting pirate sites that sell infringing copies of their textbooks. The publishers claim Google did not do enough to prevent ads for infringing works from appearing in Google’s search results. 

Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Elsevier, and McGraw Hill are among the firms that believe potential buyers are led to pirate sellers’ websites such as “Cheapbok,” “Biz Ninjas,” and “Shop Hoth” via Google Shopping Ads advertising infringing book copies. 

Despite the publishers’ takedown notices, users could still order books from pirate sellers by clicking on Google ads. The plaintiffs claim Google answered their repeated requests on the same complaint with a warning of an up to six-month refusal of processing.

The publishers’ complaint alleged contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and violations of New York General Business Law regarding deceptive and misleading practices.

This week, Google responded to the complaint with a motion to dismiss all but the contributory infringement claims, describing the other three as part of a "kitchen-sink pleading strategy."

In recent news, a phishing site impersonating ‘Google Safety Centre’ deployed malware like Latrodectus and ACR Stealer while pretending to let users download the trusted multi-factor authentication (MFA) app Google Authenticator.

Also, a fake advertisement for Authenticator that seemed to come from official sources appeared among Google search results, and the advertiser’s identity was even verified by Google. The ad led to a decoy website leading to a signed payload hosted on GitHub, where people actually downloaded the DeerStealer malware.

In other cases, sources reporting paid ads in Google results that led to scamming or phishing websites were dismissed because the promoted results “did not infringe” the Alphabet Inc.-owned company’s rules.