Google May Not Be Evil, But It Sure as Hell Isn't Interested in Free Speech
By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The fight between Warner Music and Google may at first seem like a battle between the merely rich and the ridiculously wealthy.
As the New York Times points out today, the Warner group has been reminding Google that, when it comes to music videos on its YouTube site, there is still such a thing as copyright law.
This is an inconvenient fact that the dreamy "information on the Web shall be forever free" folks, and the evil Silicon Valley suits who exploit them, like to forget.
YouTube earns hundreds of millions of dollars for Google. The artists who make the videos that lure the viewers deserve a chunk of that money.
In response to Warner's complaints, YouTube has been yanking not just the professional videos that Warner is seeking to protect, but also the amateur stuff that makes YouTube so endearing.
I find it hard to believe that Mighty Google, King of Search Engines can't figure out a way to differentiate between the professionals, and the amateurs who lampoon and imitate the pros and are generally protected under the First Amendment.
It looks more like Google and Warner are in a game of chicken, each hoping that the other gets the blame for depriving YouTube fans of popular content.
Don't get me wrong. Record companies have a long history of ripping off young musicians. And as an historian, I love Google.
Last week, when I hit a roadblock in my research on Clarence Darrow, I turned to Google Book Search. Without leaving my chair, in about an hour, I was able to resolve a mystery that, in the old days, might have taken a week of my time in the stacks in the Library of Congress.
As a writer (a class of folks whose greatest fear is to be ignored), I appreciate the fact that my 2001 biography of Tip O'Neill, instead of slipping into oblivion, lives on in a searchable format on Google, and as a "Look Inside!" book on Amazon.
Everybody wins. My work gets promoted, my research and scholarship live on, my publisher earns a few cents, and journalists, historians, and students around the world can read all about Tip whenever they need to.
Yet Google had to be dragged, at legal gunpoint, into the deal with the publishing industry that protects authors.
If Google would admit that it's just another rapacious capitalist entity, like Warner, fine. But Google claims to be something better. And it's the way it cloaks its own commercial interest in Free Speech warbling about the Web that I find insincere, and irritating.
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Tags: Google | YouTube | copyright
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Reader Comments
Ignoring Legal Threats is Bad Mojo
S G of CA: When you get a letter which claims you're hosting illegal content and threatens a lawsuit, you generally pull that content down. Under the DMCA it's the responsibility of the company alleging copyright infringement to make decently sure that copyright infringement is actually being committed.
As far as I can tell, some would like to place Google in a situation where they're going bankrupt trying to pay enough employees to check all the content going through their servers. Of course, since in this hypothetical situation Google is deciding what's legal and what's not (even after they receive a DMCA complaint), Safe Harbor protections will not apply and they'll toast in a court of law. And bankrupt.
Explain to me why it is that none of these major publishers have figured out a business model involving the internet that isn't centered around lawsuits and threatening to withhold their content? It's nice to see them get back a bit of their own medicine.
copyrights
The original author Mr. Farrell, and commenter SG of CA, seem way behind in their understanding of copyright law. Videos of amateur performances are absolutely covered by the songwriting copyright, which as a concept is much older than the sound recording copyright in a professional video.
I'd love to know Mr. Farrell's basis for asserting that YouTube nets "hundreds of millions of dollars," because the conventional wisdom is that it loses money or at best breaks even. Streaming video is very expensive in bandwidth charges.
This essay comes across as poorly thought out; lots of blogs covering the copyright issues do a better job, including the pro-Google and pro-copyright-industry positions. No wonder print media is fading...
Drinking the Kool Aid
Dee of TX -- you've been drinking the kool-aid on this one. DMCA notices are routinely processed, and ignored where appropriate, throughout the web. Googles' passive-aggressive approach is designed to stop Warner by punishing everyone. They could, with very little expense, distinguish pro from amateur. It would take less than 15 seconds of staff time to do so in most cases. Google's claim - that taking those 15 seconds to evaluate the take-down request is 'not feasible' - is pure bunk.
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