I participated on a panel at the 2013 USC Institute on Entertainment Law and Business on October 5 in Los Angeles.  The topic was the erosion of copyright, not just through a lack of enforcement, but through permissive misinterpretation of the intentions of Congress.

My presentation was based on the briefing on brand sponsored piracy that I gave to the National Association of Attorneys General earlier this year (which you can see here).  A caveat–while I discuss only Google here, these problems are not limited to Google alone.  However, since Google is a monopolist in both search and online advertising, the difference between what Google does and others do while measurable is unlikely to be statistically significant.

The argument is that due to an extraordinarily distorted interpretation of the “safe harbors” created with the best of intentions by the Congress in 1998 (the so-called “DMCA notice and takedown”), the…