Leave it to an executive of the MAFIAA (Michael O'Leary) to contort basic civic principles to slander anyone who stands up against their ridiculous, rights-trouncing mode of operation.
I'm not sure if it's doublespeak or logic. Is the MPAA above America's laws when it pays congressman to vote for specific law proposals? Or is it logic that no one should be above the law, even if law is paid for by certain industries?
Google does what is in Google's interests. Remember how Google vowed to fight for Net Neutrality until it became against their business interests in the mobile arena?
Google is "duty-bound" only to its shareholders. All the copyright-mafia needs to do is to find a way in which it becomes in Google's best interest to not fight that law, and they will change their "ethical" stance faster than you can say "u-turn".
Do you know what the revenue sources are for a lot of the pirate movie websites?
Google AdSense.
And for software...
From what I've seen, Google often displays crack sites on the first search page for software. 1st place result for author, 2nd,3rd,4th,5th,6th,7th result for crack sites.
In my own testing, I've found that at least 30% of buyers search for crack 1st, and when they can't find it, then they buy.
Google does this for two reasons:
1. There is significant revenue involved here.
2. There is significant relevancy involved here. As people gladly want to use pirated stuff to get out of paying, and want to see these results.
Google is not fighting for you. They are fighting for themselves.
Google's revenue from pirated movies and software is virtually non-existent. Their real interest is Youtube, considering half it's content probably infringes copyright somewhere.
If the revenue from pirate sites disappeared Google wouldn't even blink. The pain in the ass is regulatory compliance. Hollywood wants IP enforced on Google's dime/technology, and Google doesn't want to be their bitch.
When I used Google AdWords, 30% of the clicks came from Google "content partners" which where nothing more than link farms. I'd say that was a significant source of revenue for Google... So much so that Google even put up its own parked domain service to further its profits.
If Google was "good", they would have either got rid of this 8 years ago, or never got into it in the first place.
Don't underestimate the amount of revenue Google generates from fraud.
Justify with evidence please. Don't go spouting slanderous statements and have nothing to back them up with. If it's as obvious as you seem to be claiming then you shouldn't have any trouble backing up your point.
Google's policy isn't to be "good", it's to "do no evil" and they are very, very different things. This legislation is dangerous like a bomb. If you integrate a system that can drop an IP address from global DNS servers at will, then things are very dire.
Wikileaks got taken down enough as it was, but no one would have heard a peep if the DNS was dropped in seconds of being noticed.
Next step would be to force search providers to recognize 'infringing text' and have the DNS immediately taken down to stop the Streisand Effect.
Hello Egypt, Syria, heck the Middle Eastern Despots, you'll all have promising new positions in the US government very, very soon!
>Google's policy isn't to be "good", it's to "do no evil"
This isn't their policy, it's just a meaningless motto. Google is in this fight because it will financially impact them. There not doing it because they care about us.
Appeals to free speech and chilling effects are at best temporary measures in the fight against Protect IP and domain seizures. Even if we win this time it will keep coming back in modified form; the only way defeat it for good is to convince Washington that artists are in fact thriving, that piracy is not the real problem, and that takedown efforts are not in the interest of society. We in the tech world know this, but we are doing a poor job of making ourselves heard in Washington, and this needs to change.
If the message to legislators is: won't you please do something to protect all those poor and starving artists? Then we are well and truly hosed.
More likely: big money bought the bill and the "starving artist" facade is a convenient and facile deceit. Like all good bought laws, it works loosely on a philosophical scale, has emotional appeal, and is difficult to argue without getting into the weeds of changing business models, the way the internet works, etc.
I'm a big fan of politics (micro and macro) and philosophy, mainly because I love studying how people make group decisions. Over the past couple of years I've become more and more convinced that humanity has entered a time where things are changing so fast that the average guy isn't fully aware of how he's getting screwed over. The only saving grace is that older people can see the changes more clearly. With transhumanism on the way, Google and others creating the Borg in the cloud, and governments snooping into every little thing we do, it's almost like the previous 2500 years we have been studying very hard at how freedom and virtue inter-relate, and now comes the test.
Even that's not enough. He's assuming most people in Congress and the Obama administration give a damn about the effects of piracy on artistic expression, or indeed what is in the best interests of society. They don't. It's sad to see someone so naive in that position.
Ugh.. This article barely mentions the critics of IP. They get mentioned at the very end of the article as "those who believe in the free flow of information, and critics of Protect IP." Meanwhile, the article throws around unsourced 'billions of dollars and thousands of jobs' claims about just how awful it is that intellectual property is violated.
I don't know what motive Google has for fighting it, but I'm glad they are nonetheless
The motive for fighting it is that by crossing the line from "robotic indexer of the web" to "provider of curated search data", Google assumes substantial responsibility for the content of websites outside their control. This is a nightmarish slippery slope situation for them.
In my mind, making a person who provides a hyperlink responsible for the content of that link is just insanely wrongheaded and bespeaks a deep misunderstanding of the nature of the web.
Placing the liability for a link on the linker is more than just misunderstanding the nature of the web, it flies in the face of lots of other American principles.
People commit serious crimes with all kinds of things, screwdrivers and wire ties, let's say. Do we penalize the screwdriver maker when some crazoid kills an innocent and beautiful child with a screwdriver? No. In fact, we've just recently had the Supreme Court tell us that Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
This law is tantamount to a hitman asking directions to a street address from some passer-by, and then making the passer-by legally a murderer.
"This is a nightmarish slippery slope situation for them."
Stronger: This is an existential crisis for them. For as rich as they appear to be and for all the resources they seem to have, the task of curating the web is still an order of magnitude or two larger at least, and for certain strict interpretations of the law, this would simply crush them. And there is no chance that any politician will look at Google and see this, because all the numbers are above the "1, 2, ..., many" threshold for most humans, and the idea that the task is too large for Google will be poo-pooed by politicians if you simply make that engineering argument.
That's way overstated. The "curation" that is required here is, "Here is a list of domains that appear in court orders. Don't send ads to them with adsense, don't accept ads linking to these domains, drop them from search rankings." My reading of the law as written doesn't require more drastic action, such as scrubbing out links to them from blogs.
That is, it isn't Google's responsibility to figure out who is infringing. It is Google's responsibility to take a list given to them by US courts and follow a set of directions.
Not a pleasant task, to be sure. But it wouldn't break Google's bank account to do it.
Google can not afford to think just about the law in front of us today. This normalizes an idea they can not allow to take root, that they are responsible for the web. That idea is the existential threat, not the proximate law.
In point of fact quite a lot of sites and startups here are actually in the same danger, it's just Google has the spare resources to actually notice, pay attention, and do something about it, where a bootstrapping startup can not.
I do see something wrong with the task. We are being poor stewards of DNS. Given past abuses of the legal system by the RIAA, I am sure they will abuse us further.
I'm also quite uncomfortable with how this will work in practice. The bill has a number of assurances to protect non-US companies from having it be unfairly applied to them. I do not trust those assurances. When a US lawyer sends a subpoena to the DNS provider and the website, and the website (not being in the USA) doesn't show up, the DNS provider still will. I doubt that they will put up a vigorous defense. Based on the fact that two sides showed up and the facts presented were overwhelming, the judge will have little choice about taking action under the bill. (Even though the real facts about the website may be overwhelming in the website's favor, the judge has to judge on the facts presented in court.)
Furthermore I hate the precedent.
But when someone opposes it with ridiculous hyperbole, it is too easy for supporters of the bill to point out how ridiculous the argument is. So the fact that the bill is bad won't stop me from pointing out that the argument is even worse.
I haven't read the bill, but does it really require court orders to be shown? For what I've gathered is typical for this kind of legislation, private companies get privileges to send some kind of takedown notices (see DMCA) to the others. If those went through courts, I wouldn't be as worried.
I haven't read the bill, but does it really require court orders to be shown?
It really does. Read the full text at http://www.publicknowledge.org/files/docs/Bill-PROTECT-IP-Ac... to verify for yourself. Sections 3d and 4d say what courts can order companies like Google to do, and sections 3e and 4e say how to go about punishing Google if it fails to do what it was told to do under 3d and 4d respectively. (The difference between sections 3 and 4 is whether the lawsuit was brought by the attorney general or the copyright holder.)
They said this crap about warrantless wiretapping. It won't be used against pirate sites it will be used against sites that express a POV contrary to the administration. Wikileaks is not a 'pirate' site.
When the government asks for something you should not consider how they want to use it, you should consider how they want to abuse the power. The case they trot out is specious and could usually be dealt with via much better ways via existing law.
If these file sharing sites are conducting criminal activities then they should be taken to court and tried according to the laws of the country in which the site operates.
As far as being above America's laws, I think Google's position is clearly within a plain reading of the constitution.
Checks and balances are in section 3 (f), which describes how to file a motion to "modify, suspend or vacate" an order if the site removes the offending content or the order turns out to be in error.
It's not a proper balance unless it has provisions to dissuade those who misuse the process. "Lol our bad" and putting it back up, with no compensation for that downtime or penalty for false accusations doesn't actually do anything.
My thoughts exactly. This seems like a preemptive PR tactic by Google. Think about it. If this is bill is ultimately passed, then Google is playing it smart by taking this stance now -- to help them look more innocent later - when they inevitably roll over and comply with the US gov't.
For hackerdom at least, it's good PR. Consider Sony's case, they might have shut out a large number of talented people by the way they handled the PS3 hacking affair.
The difference is that Sony's pr was negative. And while an absence of a statement on the legislation might disappoint some people, I doubt it would actively shut out a lot of talented hackers.
While I agree that this legislation will be ineffective in fighting piracy, I don't think Google is concerned about the effects of piracy. This would seriously threaten any site that deals with legally questionable material. Instead of dealing with a DMCA notice, now they are threatening with the loss of their site. And it's not like you have to try to infringe when dealing with user submitted content. In the Google vs Viacom lawsuits, the Viacom legal team brought up videos submitted by Viacom Marketing employees as evidence of infringement.
... No, it seems to think that particular law is unjust, and as responsible citizens, they are duty-bound to fight it.