Leaked emails from Sony reveal that the MPAA was itself engaged in copyright infringement when it made a promo video trying to improve its own poor public image.
The leaked emails, taken when Sony Pictures was hacked, were published recently by Wikileaks and paint a less than flattering picture of Hollywood's main lobby group.
The emails in question were between Sony TV's Chief Marketing Officer Sheraton Kalouria and Leah Weil, the company's intellectual property lawyer, in regards to a new initiative by the MPAA to clean up its bad reputation.
The marketing campaign aimed to "fill the knowledge gap about our industry" and "claim our rightful position as innovators" at a time when the MPAA's reputation was in free fall due to their promotion of the controversial SOPA legislation.
It was also at the time that the MPAA started to focus its anti-piracy agenda against Google, due to the popularity of the search engine when it came to searching for pirated movies.
The emails reveal that the "swipe-o-matic" test commercial shot as a preview to the campaign apparently used footage from a Google commercial without the required copyright permission, something that "horrified" Kalouria when it was discovered.
The irony of the situation of the MPAA "pirating" content owned by Google at a time when the MPAA was pointing all fingers at the search engine for facilitating piracy, was perhaps not lost on the company's top IP lawyer Weil, who could only respond with a "Yikes!!!"
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