Google, already being sued for copyright infringement on its YouTube service, may have another copyright tempest brewing on its older Google Video site. The site hosts numerous full-length movies which are now being exploited by "guerilla" video sites; in essence, Google is one part of the engine that powers video piracy.

Such guerilla sites represent a new challenge for movie labels and television studios. They pop up, seemingly overnight, in all sorts of strange places, and require limited hardware and bandwidth because they do not host video clips themselves.

Instead, the sites function as aggregators of content from online video-sharing sites, offering up streaming movies and television without the delay and hassle of using a P2P client like BitTorrent.

The Wall Street Journal, which did a feature on such sites yesterday, opened with a profile of the two guys behind YouTVPC, and it gave the impression that they were linking to files "stored on servers in places like France and China" (many shows do, in fact, come from the French YouTube clone DailyMotion). But we discovered that numerous films on YouTVPC come not from China, but from Google.

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Google, Google Video, YouTube, Piracy, Pirates, Piracy sites