• by July 1, 2005

Google searchers looking for free video Thursday morning may have found a bit more then they were hoping for--video streams of copyrighted material including the entirety of the final installation of the Matrix trilogy, "Revolutions," and episodes from the comedy cartoon series "Simpsons" and "The Family Guy."

The copyrighted material was uploaded to the Google Video servers early this month. According to the search engine's data, "Revolutions" was uploaded on June 9, and several "Family Guy" cartoons were uploaded on June 7--and were taken down sometime Thursday afternoon.

Google Video allows anyone to upload content to Google's servers, and tag it with a price per-view. Any videos that are tagged as free were made available on Monday, after an editorial review process to weed out adult content, and obviously, copyrighted material. The copyrighted material that was available Thursday apparently slipped through that review process. Google also released the Google Video Player on Monday--an open source-based media player branded with the Google name.

"We encourage anyone who has a copyright concern or complaint to send us a DMCA content removal notice," a Google spokesperson stated. "However, if we see content in Google Video that clearly violates copyright or our policies we will remove it."