Microsoft Attacks Google on Copyright 188
The Microsoft Corporation has prepared a blistering attack on rival Google, arguing that the Web search leader takes a cavalier approach to copyright protection. The attack, such as it were, came from Microsoft's Associate General Counsel who was giving a speech to the Association of American Publishers...who have a copyright lawsuit against Google for the last sixteen months. So, an audience ready to hear about how Bad Google is.
Oh boy. (Score:4, Funny)
Oh boy. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Microsoft's half finished sentence. (Score:5, Funny)
no doubt; kettle meet pot. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:no doubt; kettle meet pot. (Score:5, Informative)
- Apple Quick Time; Lead to a major 150 million settlement.
- The code and idea for the embedding in MSIE. Still in the settlement as I recall.
- How about MSIE itself. they cut a deal to pay the mozaic group spin-off a
.01 / each one sold and then embedded it (i.e. the company got SQUAT).
- Or how about the theft of the stacker's work in dos 6.2. IIRC, they had to pay something like 75 million (not chump change back in the 80's).
And that is just off the top of the head.Man, you MS types have incredibly short memories on MS's actions, let alone how to use google.
Re:no doubt; kettle meet pot. (Score:4, Insightful)
While definitely not fair, and not really moral either, MOSAIC got their ass handed to them on a platter. Nowhere in the deeds of contract for the agreement did they ever specify minimum sales prices, minimum volumes, etc., hell they didn't even have a clause that required the product to be sold at all.
If MOSAIC is to be pissed at anyone, they should be going after their law firm, for letting such a gaping, gaping hole slip through the contract - it wasn't even a minor loophole that MS used, it was the entire point of the freaking contract!
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DOS (Score:2)
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You are correct. (Score:2)
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Well known = Your biased Opinion....
MS has always paid rather well to companies they aquire technology from, and in terms of literature or artwork, again they pay well for the content. Look up Gates and buying digital artwork.
Just because you believe myth, does not make it reality.
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Google is your friend (and a friend to the copyright folks). At the least, you would have done well to read the 2'nd post where I detailed just a few of MS's dirty deeds (that were done dirt cheap).
Look up Gates and buying digital artwork.
And your point? Hitler did the vast majoirty of things legally as did Idi Amin, Al Capone, Scooter libbey, Carl Rove, Dick Cheney, GWB, Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, and Brian Flannigan (a hooligan that I grew up with) and the next person who s
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More fun from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad news, Rubin: Google is exactly right to say that. Fair Use Rule #4 evaluates "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." And I don't think it's hard to show that prominence on a Google property affects this potential market *extremely positively.
Re:More fun from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all bullshit. They don't care about their copyrights until they think they can squeeze money from someone. When YouTube was just YouTube, there was just as much copyrighted stuff there ans there is now. "Google has deep pockets now. They must be infringing something of ours. Let's get em." It's bullshit, plus Google hasn't even started to realize the profit from YouTube advertising. If you were producing a sitcom, wouldn't you want clips of your crap to go viral on YouTube? It's got much better chance happening there than it does on mystupidsitcom.abc.disney.com that's for sure.
Re:More fun from TFA (Score:5, Funny)
That comes dangerously close to Google abusing its search monopoly.
You mean mystupidsitcom.abc.disney.go.com. They paid a lot of money for the "go.com" TLD, and damn it they're gonna use it!
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Well yeah, and Microsoft bundles WMP and makes Internet Explorer unremovable, and various state, federal and foreign governments enjoin and penalize it for that. It's a no-no to use your monopoly power to give yourself an uncompetitive advantage in another business. This can be seen as Google becoming a victim of its own success. If it's ubiquitous and a one-stop-search shop, it becomes a kind of gatekeeper to the d
How would you stop it? (Score:2)
Re:More fun from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft's half finished sentence. (Score:4, Funny)
They ask permission like the mafia asks permission.
Kafka (Score:2)
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On a more serious note, I thing Microsoft is upset because Google got all that content making it useless to Microsoft who wants to buy exclusive distribution right to it. How can you sell a monopoly product when the competition gives it away for free?
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So MS can be upset... buying rights (and compensating people for their work) is far 'neater' than wandering down to a library, photocopying it wholesale, and proceeding to p
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Or an industry standard.
mmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's more evil? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google really didn't care they could do far far worse to abuse copyright than anything they've done so far. Microsoft is just placating an audience.
um, not to defend MS but (Score:2)
The bad news, of course, is that I haven't seen a tangible sign of change in the intervening 12 years.
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Yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
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English? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yesterday, today, tomorrow (Score:5, Interesting)
Today: Microsoft attacks $company initiative as being illegal, immoral and bad for business in general
Tomorrow: Microsoft try to embrace the very same business model of $company, only with a layer of DRM on top of it, and try to leverage it using the profits of the OS and Office division.
Nothing different from all other endeavors from our good old Microsoft. Who didn't have it coming?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Content is not the holy grail it's made out to (Score:2)
1. Google goes into publishing business.
2. Google announces it will only publish copyleft books.
3. ???
4. Profit.
(??? might be puts ads on each page of the books which are online and pays the authors...???)
Hey, google and a slashdot business model. Does it get any better than that?
all the best,
drew
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zotzbr o&search=Search [youtube.com]
Bad Google (Score:2, Funny)
What is with the capital B?!
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As an author (Score:5, Insightful)
If publishers want to stop piracy of texts, STOP RELEASING EBOOKS THE SAME DAY FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
Tom
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I don't know if people who torrented the books later bought copies. For me, I wasn't really that motivated by getting rich (or making more than a couple grand). I was more into getting the ideas out there. The first book, is actually available [legally] for free from the LibTomMath ar
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If I ever found something I could only get in ebook format I might print it out to read at my leisure but I would rather buy a neatly bound copy.
This especially applies to text books. I know they are usually more expensive but I like the ease of use a good old fashioned paper book provides. I also like the neatness that
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I'm positive that, at least in my case, my sales suck due to me being a first time author, relatively unknown outside my circle, and not advertising the books. However, on the very same day
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The thing that drives legit audio downloads is the quality control. For less than a
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Google is doing NOTHING wrong legally, morally or pragmatically.
The publishers are just going on a control freak rampage because they are (much like you are) trying to perpetuate the misguided and incorrect notion of copyright as something comparable to real property rights.
Google is doing nothing different than any other dead tree published index that you might have been forcibly exposed to as a child.
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You may argue that's not harmful to the rights owners, but that's not the point. They're not exercising fair use when they take snippets out of my book, and then link to amazon to say "you can buy it here." As odd as that sounds...
Tom
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teacup calling the teapot fat (Score:5, Insightful)
Is either buying out your competitors or putting them out of business "creating content"?
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What, is this insult your audience 101?
all the best,
drew
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zotzb
Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why there have classically been exceptions allowed for sampling information, why one case of illegal copying haven't been used to call every tangential person involved in the copy from being punished, and that the original intent of copyrights, to 'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", has classically been the focus, rather than just blindly punishing people, who naturally tend to share information.
Ryan Fenton
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Another comment "Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on t
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Huh?
You might not be aware that the Publisher's lawsuit against Google is the wholesale photocopying of their texts in paper form to their 'electronic retrieval system'.
Last I checked, content on paper was not subject to the DMCA.
Google is trying to create a protection where it doesn't exist. "Oh, but the end product of our wholesale real world photocopying is an electronic product, ergo the whole thing must be subject to DMCA"
Can I be the first to say.... (Score:2)
Good.
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blistering? (Score:3, Funny)
Is this April 1st? (Score:5, Funny)
Next Article:
RIAA concerned about musicians being ripped off by lopsided contracts
After that:
Auto Makers insist Congress must tighten emissions and fuel economy standards.
strange relationships (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone Else Seeing a Pattern Here? (Score:5, Interesting)
GNU/Linux
Google
Personally am getting a feeling of: 'same bilge, different day' from Microsoft.
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all the best,
drew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls1QealrmLk [youtube.com]
Microsoft is attacking Apple indirectly. (Score:2)
Wasn't it always Microsoft that accused competitors of fighting in the courtroom because they were not able to win in the marketplace?
This translates to "Google is BAD" (Score:2)
MSN search cache? (Score:5, Interesting)
Copy this..! (Score:2, Insightful)
Parents getting sued because they are telling a story from a children's book?
Me talking about a movie explaining how great the storyline is?
Am I still allowed to sing my favorite songs under the shower?
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"Fair use of a copyrighted work... for purposes such as criticism, comment... is not an infringement of copyright." Title 17, US Code.
Yes, unless you are showing in public and charging admission or trying to gain some commercial advantage. See Section 110.
Not even pot kettle black (Score:2)
We should all boycott Microsoft's products (if we can), like the Zune, Vista, the XBox 360, Office, etc...
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You'll forgive me and the sizable portion of people who don't find the wholesale photocopying of people's works and the profiting therefrom as being "admirable".
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Attack from the MS legal dept (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that threats against Google are being launched by Microsoft's legal team instead of their engineering department tells you all you need to know.
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The real deal (Score:3, Funny)
What is content? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and I.P.O.s"
For what it is worth, Google does make a lot of money on the work of others, but not by copying or stealing it. Google and other search engines analyze, categorize, and parse copyrighted material and create indexes that make it easy to search. Makes that one document in billions findable.
This is no small feat, and copyright holders are making more money with google than without. Google indexes about 8-10 billion documents. They make zero cash for the documents. They make money providing a service to the people searching for material. That service is finding documents. The copyright holders should count themselves fortunate.
It is a self serving argument that some of google's cash belongs to me because they use my documents. Google drives people looking for your data to you. If you don't want this service that is done for you for free, then you can opt out at any time.
ouch! (Score:3, Funny)
OUCH! That's gotta hurt...
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Don't embarass yourself (Score:2)
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"As it were" is more of a colloquialism at this point is it not?
I work in a diverse company and one of my (now former sadly) supervisors was from Lebanon. He dropped by my office to see how I was doing and I beat him to the punch and asked: "How goes it?"
This, apparently, broke the English parser in his brain as he disassembled the sentence fragment and tried to make sense of it.
"how goes it?"
"... how it goes?"
"!"
"man, that just doesn't make any sense!"
"What's this means, how goes i
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But I found it funnier than a fart in a phonebox.
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but that's not a sufficiently compelling reason to expunge them from your noggin;
because some might not grok your froodiness. How mind-numbingly bland, man.
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thought the projector of it ; but I say, and say truly, that my lord admiral
-Francis Bacon, 1859
"I had heard such, as it were, sing before Jordan was half forded. I had seen
faces where, pallid as they were, I beheld more celestial triumph than I had
-William Fishbough, 1874
"... the covetous cruelty of the common sort, by their eager biting at gold, being
such as it were enough to eclipse the brightness of a Prince's bount
Fancis Bacon Salutes you! (Score:2)
I'm glad you feel that you can correct francis bacon's english, but your response is unknowingly funny. You see Francis Bacon was noted for his discourses on the use of syllogism [wikipedia.org] in argument. Your insult to Bacon is a pure example of syllogism. 1) I think the english phrase is bad 2) francis b
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Such as it were, indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
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The subjunctive mood is commonly used to introduce a hypothetical case (often contrary to fact) which is then considered in the remainder of the sentence, exactly as your example used it, e.g. "Were I to go out, I would need a coat (but I don't intend to, so I'm fine without)".
In this case the writer's intention appears to be to imply that either this wasn't actually intended as an attack, or that it was intended to be an attack, but that he thi
Re:It is so sad (Score:4, Insightful)
MS spent $1+ billion in R&D last quarter so it's not for lack of funding. It's not that they don't have brilliant people. It's that MS as a corporation has conflicting and competing goals. Their different divisions could come out with great products but on the whole, their products must not undermine the whole corporation. Namely they must do everything to ensure Windows is the only operating system, Window Media the only media format, SQL server the only SQL database, etc. The Office division could do a port to Linux. There is some money to be made, but that would undermine Windows. Zune could have been tied to more open formats but that would hurt Windows and the Media division. And the list goes on.
Sony has the same problem. Their MP3 players could have been great and taken the market from Apple but they had to protect their content division. Thus the first versions used proprietary formats that all but crippled them.