Google: Emails show Hood, MPAA wanted to smear company
Emails among a Motion Picture Association of America lobbyist and two staff attorneys in Attorney General Jim Hood's office outline a plan to use movie studios' media arms to smear Google, the tech giant said in a court filing.
The notice of supplementary evidence submission filed July 23 in federal court in New York is part of Google's effort to force the MPAA to turn over communications that outline its relationship with Hood and other attorneys general. Hood has spent the past couple years investigating Google, claiming the company violates state law, alleging it assists the proliferation of pirated music, that its auto-complete search feature suggests illegal activities and that distributing YouTube ad revenue promotes illegal drug sales.
Other allegations include the ability to buy fake IDs and the sale of stolen credit card data on Google platforms. U.S. District Judge for Mississippi's Southern District Henry Wingate issued an injunction in March that temporarily halted the investigation. Almost immediately, Google filed court documents asking for correspondence between Hood and the MPAA. The matter now sits in a federal appeals court. Forty attorneys general have filed amicus briefs in support of Hood's appeal.
Google attached as an exhibit to its latest filing a March 2013 email exchange between MPAA director of external state government affairs Brian Cohen and AG's office staff attorneys Meredith Aldridge and Blake Bee. In the correspondence, the three bullet-point potential agenda items for the June 2013 meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Boston.
One of them is referred to "an attack on Google," carried out by the media divisions of NBCUniversal Media, Viacom and Twenty-First Century Fox. Among the suggestions were a segment on NBC's The Today Show in which an unnamed "large investor of Google" denounces the tech giant's online conduct. The email also mentions a Wall Street Journal editorial that warns against Google's stock falling "in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed."
Making "live buys" via Google search of illegal drugs, illegal firearms and counterfeit goods available to media was part of the plan, too.
"Please make sure you keep it confidential – we don't want word getting out about the plans," Aldridge wrote to Cohen. Bee was not copied on that email, but Cohen did loop him in a day earlier when he asked about agenda items for the NAAG meeting.
"Our pleadings speak for themselves as does the fact that forty other state attorneys general support our office’s authority to conduct this investigation of Google," read a written statement from Hood's office. A Google spokesman said no one from the company would comment beyond the court filing.
Contact Clay Chandler at (601) 961-7264 or cchandler@gannett.com. Follow @claychand on Twitter.