Google has reacted angrily to claims by Rupert Murdoch that the search giant is supporting piracy.
The News Corporation chief took to his recently created Twitter account over the weekend, launching a tirade of tweets against Google and its alleged cohorts in the White House.
"So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery," Murdoch tweeted, following that up with: "Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying."
Murdoch, whose company owns movie studio 20th Century Fox and many other media outlets, continued his attack over the course of the weekend. "Just been to google search for mission impossible. Wow, several sites offering free links. I rest my case."
Yet his case was far from rested. "Sure misunderstand many things, but not plain stealing. Incidentally google blocks many other undesirable things," he added, before going on to again accuse President Obama and "his friends" of "backing pirates".
In a statement sent to PC Pro, Google denied it was fostering piracy. "Google respects copyright - and we’ve worked hard to help rights holders deal with piracy," the company stated.
"Last year we took down five million infringing web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads. Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking US companies to censor the internet".
Murdoch has orchestrated a long-running campaign against Google. In 2009, he accused Google News of stealing content from newspaper websites, and followed that up a year later, accusing the search engine of "producing a river of gold" from "words taken from newspapers".
This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk
