The full story of Project Goliath and Hollywood’s quest to control the web

A new appeals court ruling has reopened the fight between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. Filed this morning by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the core of the ruling is procedural, vacating an earlier injunction against a subpoena filed by Hood against Google. The court found that the injunction was not necessary because the issue could have been more appropriately adjudicated in a district court.

Google has not announced whether it will appeal the ruling, saying only, “we’re reviewing the implications of the Court’s decision, which focused on whether our claim was premature rather than on the merits of the case.”

A federal court in Mississippi is convinced so far that Google will prevail against the state’s attorney general in a lawsuit over an allegedly burdensome and over-broad subpoena. Google filed the suit a week after The Verge published a report tying Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to a secret Hollywood campaign to fight Google, pinning blame on it for piracy. Hood had handed Google a 79-page-long subpoena requesting a wealth of information and interviews, which Google is now fighting back against on grounds that it violates its First and Fourth Amendment rights.

The court granted Google a preliminary injunction against the attorney general earlier this month, and that’s now being elaborated on in an order issued Friday. The court says that it believes Google has demonstrated a “substantial likelihood” that it will prevail on its First Amendment claims and that Google’s Fourth Amendment claim has “substantial merit.” This isn’t necessarily a surprise — Google appeared to have a strong case, and a “substantial” chance at prevailing in a case is necessary for this kind of injunction — but the court’s language emphasizes why it’s critical here.

Google just chalked up an early win against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, an MPAA-friendly prosecutor who was implicated in a number of Goliath documents. A federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, has granted a preliminary injunction against Hood’s efforts to fight content piracy on Google’s network, restricting any subpoena or further investigative action from Hood while the case is still in progress. It’s still early in the case, but the injunction represents a significant win for Google and a real setback for both Hood and his supporters at the MPAA.

In 2013, Hood sent Google a massive, 79-page subpoena for data related to content piracy in Search, but Google contested the subpoena, claiming it overstepped the attorney general’s authority and violated a number of US privacy laws. Hood had called a “time out” to the legal actions in the aftermath of the Goliath disclosures, but the court case has continued in the months since. Ultimately, Hood was seeking a similar legal authority over Google’s network as SOPA looked to establish, although Hood was pursuing it through judicial rather than legislative channels.

Hollywood’s war on piracy has reached a strange impasse. While the MPAA and others have launched lawsuits against US-based infringers, reaching offshore torrent sites like Isohunt and The Pirate Bay is still a slow process, and whenever a site is taken down, others quickly pop up to fill its place. As a result, the MPAA has consistently pushed for the power to block infringing sites from the internet: first by pushing for new laws like SOPA in 2011, then through a series of novel legal tactics. The fight has pitted them against some of the most powerful companies on the web, and drawn them into a long, secret battle with Google.

But leaked documents show that Hollywood has a new secret weapon in the fight, a little-known legal venue that’s poised to take on new powers over the digital realm. It’s called the International Trade Commission, a quasi-judicial agency that regulates imported goods as they enter the country. Traditionally, that means physical goods — if you want to ship in a boatload of fake iPhones, the ITC is the agency that will stop you — but the ITC recently gave itself the power to rule on data as it crosses US borders, as a result of a complex 3D printing case. If the ruling holds, it could have huge implications for the way data moves across the global web, and give the MPAA the site-blocking powers it’s been grasping at for years.

The same groups that brought down SOPA seem to be turning their attention to the recent Goliath news. On the heels of Google’s lawsuit against the Mississippi attorney general, a coalition of 13 advocacy groups has turned its attention to the recent actions against Google, and is issuing a letter criticizing Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s role in the MPAA program known as Project Goliath. Hood has already called for a “time out” in the ongoing legal battle, but judging by the letter, many web freedom groups are unimpressed.

The group includes the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all of which were active in the fight against SOPA. While Hood’s investigations were limited to Google as a company, the group called out the new push for site-blocking powers as a bid to resurrect SOPA by other means. “SOPA was a bad idea at the federal level,” the letter concludes, “and any SOPA revival on a state level is an equally bad idea.”

Hours after Google took legal action against him, Mississippi’s attorney general is retreating. Jim Hood issued a statement late Friday saying he is “calling a time out, so that cooler heads may prevail.” His next sentence seemed to be missing a word or two, but here you go: “I will reach out to legal counsel Google’s board of directors to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the issues affecting consumers that we attorneys general have pointed out in a series of eight letters to Google.”

Hood has come under scrutiny for his cozy relationship with Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA has been a lucrative source of campaign contributions to Hood, and Hood has adopted one of its pet issues: getting search engines to delist sites that host pirated materials. Today, Google sued Hood in district court in Mississippi, arguing Hood had singled the company out for “burdensome, retaliatory” subpoena that would force it to produce 141 specific documents, 62 interviews, and a broad range of information related to “dangerous content.” “In order to respond to the Subpoena in full,” the company wrote in its filing, “Google would have to produce millions of documents, at great expense and disruption to its business.”

Last Friday, The Verge published leaked documents revealing a secret legal campaign to discredit Google, coordinated by the MPAA on behalf of the major Hollywood studios. The documents show a continued focus on the power to blocking sites from the web — a central issue in the 2011 SOPA debates — and a concerted effort to enlist state attorney generals in that fight. Both Google and the MPAA have issued harsh statements over the news, but today the fight is growing into a full-fledged legal battle.

This morning, Google filed a lawsuit in Mississippi district court against State Attorney General Jim Hood, alleging Hood had singled the company out for a “burdensome, retaliatory” subpoena. (Hood has faced scrutiny for his role in the MPAA efforts.) “We regret having to take this matter to court,” Google said in a statement, “and we are doing so only after years of efforts to explain both the merits of our position and the extensive steps we’ve taken on our platforms.”

The Motion Picture Association of America has responded to Google’s condemnation of Project Goliath, a secret and ambitious anti-piracy program revealed in leaked Sony documents. Yesterday, the search company said it was “deeply concerned” by the MPAA’s efforts to push new content-blocking methods and help attorneys general build legal cases against Google, accusing the organization of attempting to “secretly censor the internet.” But a spokesperson for the MPAA says these claims are disingenuous.

“Google’s effort to position itself as a defender of free speech is shameful,” said the spokesperson. “Freedom of speech should never be used as a shield for unlawful activities and the internet is not a license to steal. Google’s blog post today is a transparent attempt to deflect focus from its own conduct and to shift attention from legitimate and important ongoing investigations by state attorneys general into the role of Google Search in enabling and facilitating illegal conduct — including illicit drug purchases, human trafficking and fraudulent documents as well as theft of intellectual property.”

After hacked documents revealed that Sony and other media companies were attempting to pass harsh anti-piracy measures, Google has condemned its actions. “We are deeply concerned about recent reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) led a secret, coordinated campaign to revive the failed SOPA legislation through other means,” the company said in a blog post today. It went on to point out details that The Verge and other sites found while combing through the terabytes of information leaked by the hacker group Guardians of Peace.

Among other things, Sony and other members of the MPAA joined a campaign known as “Project Goliath,” a heavy-handed attempt to block pirate sites from appearing online. The project appeared after the conspicuous failure of SOPA, an anti-infringement bill that was widely protested and finally shelved in early 2012. Since then, the film industry has supposedly stepped back and tried a friendlier approach, but it’s continued to go after Google, which it sees as enabling piracy. The leaked documents show that it aggressively pushed state attorneys general to go after Google, allocating funds and building potential legal cases against the search giant.

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.

Most anti-piracy tools take one of two paths: they either target the server that’s sharing the files (pulling videos off YouTube or taking down sites like The Pirate Bay) or they make it harder to find (delisting offshore sites that share infringing content). But leaked documents reveal a frightening line of attack that’s currently being considered by the MPAA: What if you simply erased any record that the site was there in the first place?

To do that, the MPAA’s lawyers would target the Domain Name System (DNS) that directs traffic across the internet. The tactic was first proposed as part of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2011, but three years after the law failed in Congress, the MPAA has been looking for legal justification for the practice in existing law and working with ISPs like Comcast to examine how a system might work technically. If the system works, DNS-blocking could be the key to the MPAA’s long-standing goal of blocking sites from delivering content to the US. At the same time, it represents a bold challenge to the basic engineering of the internet, threatening to break the very backbone of the web and drawing the industry into an increasingly nasty fight with Google.

Today, most observers would tell you the piracy fight has reached a standstill. It’s easy to take down infringing links from platforms like Google and YouTube, and a string of international prosecutions has turned file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay and Isohunt into an endangered species. At the same time, more draconian measures that would wipe the sites off the internet entirely have largely failed within the US after a string of legislative defeats that culminated in 2011’s SOPA and PIPA fights.

But Hollywood isn’t happy with the status quo, new documents purporting to be from the Sony hack show that the MPAA still sees SOPA-style site blocking as a primary goal, a stance that has put them increasingly at odds with Google. Blocking pirate sites is such a focus that the MPAA often rules out more incremental efforts at fighting piracy on the grounds that they would stand in the way of the group’s ultimate goal, which is to restrict users from browsing certain web sites. The industry may have lost the fight to make SOPA law, but it’s still aggressively pursuing SOPA’s goals.

Today on The Verge we published a story about a major operation by the MPAA to broadly and significantly impact the distribution of information, which would impact how free speech works on the internet. We obtained this information from a massive hack whose prime objective was to punish a US studio for exercising its free speech rights. The irony is not lost on us.

The Sony leak is a story that lands at the intersection of tech, business, and entertainment; in other words, right in The Verge’s wheelhouse. (I was brought on as the site’s first dedicated entertainment editor last month.) But we missed some of the first big stories to come out of the Sony leaks, and if that goes down in our history as a loss, then as an editor I take at least partial responsibility. When the news broke that terabytes of personal data of the employees of a corporation was now available for public consumption, my initial reaction was not, “Oh rad, let’s see if we can get our hands on that James Bond script.” It was alarm at the severity and purported intention of the act, and the slow horror of realizing that this was the “cyber Pearl Harbor” Leon Panetta had been waiting for, except instead of the Pentagon or the CIA, it targeted an entertainment company.

What is “Goliath” and why are Hollywood’s most powerful lawyers working to kill it?

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.