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September 14, 2006
Pardonnez-moi? Yes, you read it right the first time. A European court last month agreed with a group of regional publishers in Belgium that accused Google of ripping off their content. The court ordered Google to remove text summaries of the newspapers' articles, along with Web links to the publishers' sites.
Not very much was made of the decision on this side of the pond. Investors shrugged off the news and continued to send Google's stock ever higher. Google subsequently cried foul and said it would challenge the ruling. No surprise there.
There's a fine line between fair use and infringement, and U.S. courts have chosen not to erect impediments against creating something like Google News.
Should they?
Interesting idea--but we're not even close to having that conversation in this country. The European court struck at the heart of the Web 2.0 assumption that it's perfectly all right to profit from another company's content without permission and without payment. Google's acquisition of YouTube makes this more than an academic question. The deal puts an urgent onus on Google management to block the uploading of copyrighted material on the video-sharing service. Otherwise, the lawsuits are going to start flying.
Like Napster, YouTube may be the extreme case. Still, both companies, which relied on the use of "free" content, were nourished by the widely held conviction that all Net content should be free. I want to be charitable, but it's hard to argue against the proposition that Napster and YouTube flourished because of theft.
You can't get away with that idea in other walks of life. Believe me, I would love to waltz into the local bookstore, browse through the aisles, and walk out with a bag full of novels without making a pit stop at the cashier. Same goes for the record store, or the neighborhood video joint. Life doesn't work that way. Our social arrangements don't allow some people to work for others without the remotest chance of receiving compensation. You may remember that this nation fought a civil war to eradicate that despicable practice.
However, when it comes to the Internet, woe to the stick-in-the mud (like me) who fails to swim with the crowd that believes all Internet content must be there for the taking. In other words, it's a big candy store in the clouds, open to one and all.
I remember the hue and cry that went up after The New York Times decided to charge for some its articles. Judging from the reaction it triggered, you would have thought the Grey Lady had come out in support of making Albanian our national tongue. The mob of critics decided to ignore the troubling detail that it costs money to turn out a newspaper. Such is the challenge Internet publishers increasingly confront.
In a brilliant piece he wrote last year, Nick Carr described the "amorality of Web 2.0". Among other things, he discussed how the Internet was changing the economics of creative work.
And so it is.
Maybe Google's spat with the Europeans can serve as a useful starting point for clarifying the discussion of copyright protection in the new cyberage. Lots of issues need to get sorted out. But the longer we keep putting off this discussion, the more we delude ourselves into believing there should be free lunches for some but not others.
That's not amoral. It's immoral.
Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.
See more CNET content tagged:
Web 2.0, copyright protection, Napster Inc., publisher, Google Inc.
131 comments
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The original creator of an object (text, graphics, video etc.) maintains the right to be mentioned alongside his piece (since the "Author" is a standard attribute of each element) but if he decides to put (=share) his creation on the Web (version x.x), others can view it, criticize it and quote/use it.
If something is not for sharing, it should not be here. Private clubs and commercial companies should use their own secure intranets, in order to stay separated from the rest of the dangerous, "free" world.
Beyond that, do you really think most of the songs being downloaded from the original Napster were put onto Napster by the aritsts or the labels? Do you think most of the copyrighted professional videos on YouTube were placed there by the movie studios and TV studios?
You're rationalizing behavior that is illegal and, as Coop says, immoral.
This debate would be much easier if there were more people who had actually created works worth protecting; but if everybody could create works that had value, they would lack value because scarcity would no longer be an issue. So I guess I'll just have to hope that more pieces like Coop's help people to understand the importance of encouraging creativity.
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always be the same just a different name for it.
You have to fight for credit.
NOTE: Eigen-value lock is the indexing acting as if it were a basin or attractor causing a resource to 'pull' searches for a particular topic toward that resource. It isn't anything new but for those who use the web naively, it is something to be aware of.
All this content exists for the sole purpose of consumption and it is the consumer who eventually defines the relationship with his or her money.
Increasingly, companies are exerting more control over how their products are distributed to the consumer in order to realize as much revenue as possible. Nowhere is this more true than with products that can be disassociated from their physical media like music, movies, software and even books.
The problem is the consumer is heading in the opposite direction. They have embraced the immediacy of the Internet as a distribution channel. They expect access to anything at the click of a mouse and as iTunes has proven they will pay for it.
But, the response from most suppliers is to instead focus on the protection of their intellectual property instead of embracing and utilizing the tools that are already in place.
Who wins this battle? Ultimately, it is the consumer, because as my old Supply Chain professor put it...
"The only person in a supply chain with any money is the person at the end of the supply chain."
...and ultimately they will decide how and where they spend their money.
"They have embraced the immediacy of the Internet as a distribution"
This should be worded "They embrace the ability to take for free of the Internet as a distribution"
Too many people have found that they can find it without paying, and have decided that is a better route.
The one thing that bothers me about the entire discussion of digital media is that if you are free to use the analogy of a bricks and mortar store and shoplifting, then you darn well better include the analogy of a public library too. There is an argument to be made for serving the public good, which exists beyond the profit motive, and the media needs to start placing that concept prominently as the third leg in this discussion called Web 2.0.
Going back to the idea of library. at any time only one person can have possession of the book. You need to return it, for file sharing you do not return the files. If u are overdue, u pay a fine. Remember the days of napster where one could build up a song library of thousands of song literally overnight.
For every rich executive, hundreds more earning their living from the money you last spent on movies, dvd, cd or software.
I have no problems with people posting their own clips on youtube, small bands posting songs to promote themselves. When you are given a free lunch, take it by all means. When its not free, pay for it.
I believe that we, the people, need to make a cultural and economic shift away from this supply and demand system that strives to exploit our emotional and appetitic desires, and construct a more rational approach to how we distribute resources and why we distribute resources.
Honestly, this isnt rocket science.
And so he feels that it is important that we slowly and "fairly" price and distribute these things so that companies still make tons of profits. And even though this applies in the material world, I don't think that the nature of the internet allows these laws to naturally exist because the internet is a different type of reality where objects have different properties, and different laws of physics apply. It is only common sense that people are caring, nurturing creatures that will willingly share their property with other people for the overall benefit of our species.
But then no one will make money?!?!?! But no one will need to spend money, because everything they want and need they will have unlimited access to. The problem comes when companies and people want more then they need, and philosophically, that's wrong.
Likewise, electronic content does not magically appear at the press of a mouse button. Someone, somewhere supplied the ingredients.
With a small group of people this works but even in hippie communes, it breaks down when enough people get involved. Eventually, someone overlooks the good faith that all this works based on and takes advantage.
Our nature is to retain energy in reserve for emergencies. We pack on calaries, we desire stockpiles of food, we crave more possessions. The origin is understandable; If you are too week to run from a threat, you die. If you are too week to last through the winter with shortages of food to hunt/forage for, you die. If you retain enough energy (lounge on the couch or your favourite cave doorway) to always be able to run away, you live. If you retain enough fat to support you through food shortages, you live.
What is a benificial natural instinct from our earlier evolution is now seen as a negative and profit threatening traite. But then, I see the greed of big business and constant advertising being crammed in my face as the erroding threat.
Perhaps the issue is that the old inet users remember the origins in DARPA. A network of computers with high insodent tollerance to freely share information between distributed locations.
Stay with me here, In the early days (one email was enough and SPAM was not yet concieved) websites wher enot plastered with adds (how many adds are on this article page alone?) and poppups. Domain names where relevant to the business who registered them.
Popups, Spam, Domain Trolls all negative internet traites motivated by profit and most often motivated by advertising and comercialism.
Business sees the internet as a cost cutting action. budgets for packaging, shipping, advertising can all be cut through the magic of the internet. Indaviduals homes can be invaded, at little cost; adds can be broadcast to the whole world regardless of the products value.
So here we are, the user sees the original internet (well, mostly only sees http and thinks oen protocol is the whole internet) as it was designed to freely share information. The business see's Web2.0 (or whatever the buzword of the week is) as an advertising free ride and new profit channel.
This Us vs Them argument will go round and round for years the way it has with every other Us vs Them theme (VHS/Beta, Consumers/DRM, OSS/MS/Mac)
People want compare Google to a theif... but google (and the web in general) have mechanisms in place to allow a website to opt out of allowing their content to be included in the search engine (and the news area is a search engine as well people).
The problem is that the companies that are whining are too lazy to take measures to prevent their content from being used. They dont want to opt out, and think that the should automatically be opt'ed out. Well these are the same sorts of copanies that make the rest of us opt out of their telemarketing calls and hords of junk mail (as in the postal service kind).
I am not saying that I think everyone should have a right to everything on the web, or accessable through the web. But I think this "sharing" issue is being blown way out of proportion.
"the problem is that the companies that are whining are too lazy to take measures to prevent their content from being used" and yet when they implement DRM, people immediately scream foul and throw temper tantrums.
Google does the same thing. They have everything organized in a complex system that lets me search through many different means, and then returns a list of possible results, and then tells me where I can find each of them.
Going on Google and seeing a short description of a web page and deciding if it is what you want is no different then going to a book store and reading a few pages of the book before deciding if it is what you want. The web would be virtually useless without search engines. And for companies such as Google to function, it is necessary for them to index and document all of the information that is available in the library that we call the internet. Without search engines and their systems of organization, it would be like walking into a library with large piles of books laying everywhere in some random scatter and saying "Hi! I'm looking for The Internet For Dummies" and the librarian saying "Umm... I think we have that somewhere... I'm not really sure though... you'll have to check" and then pointing you to the huge pile of billions of books.
It is the nature of humans to want to add structure to chaos, and that is all that Google is doing, and I don't think they have evil or immoral motives, and I think they actually mean to help these companies by organizing their information. And they give them a means to be omitted from their search engine if they make that request. So I guess Google goes by the theory that hey, if the book is in the library, then we're going to organize it, and companies are thinking hey, this is my book and you can't organize it with other books unless I say so! But really, these companies are just hurting themselves.
Just thought I'd mention it.
For those who keep forgetting, the internet is not owned by the US.
Google writes a summary of a news article (at their own effort, by the way), and publishes it, plus a link back to the paper's site, on the website that Google built and pays for. Google should earn income based on all that effort. The newspaper earns (if it is smart) because viewers who want to read more (if the story is interesting enough) go to the paper's site where they view the paper's advertising. Or the paper blocks access except to members, and so Google never saw the article in the first place (Google is not a "clipping service" scanning and copying hard-copy newspapers).
Doctors offices, coffee houses, hotels, airlines, and others let people read a "shared" copy of newspapers & magazines for free, and make a profit off the people who happen to be there. No crime. People often spend hours in a bookstore reading for free - many stores even encourage it, since it actually increases sales (esp. if they have a coffee shop). again, no crime.
I take a song and make a video clip that I give away (free) and post on YouTube - no worse than spraying gaffitti on a newspaper story as political commentary/art and posting it on a local community bulletin board - it just reaches more people and looks nicer...
Whining about copyright infringement when there is little or no actual loss of income (I am NOT talking about PirateBay, or pre-Napster) is just Luddite sour grapes in the face of dramatic economic change.
While some content is very cheap to produce (i.e. music), some is very expensive (i.e. news---travel budgets for correspondents, etc). Even the "cheap" content belies a simple fact: how will whoever produces the content get money to eat?
2) Paid subscriptions to read the full article
3) Welfare if they are too stupid to implement #1 or #2, above.
Try being a professional musician and see if it's cheap to produce.
How is what Google does any different that what my public library does? The library indexes content and gives it away for free to people who probably won't buy the book. Doesn't the Public Library System, using your analysis, injure content producers too?
Google doesn't profit from ripping off other people's content. It profits from advertsing, just like your magazine and other print media do. All Google does is direct traffic to your own site, where maybe you can make some money from advertsing, too, just like your print division. Seems like I saw ads all around your "think-piece". Is Google stealing that revenue too?
Maybe you should quit trying to turn back time. New inventions always have an unpleasant way of hurting exisitng products and markets. The smart ones figure out how to adapt to the new reality, and the dumb ones write columns about the good old days. Please retire now, and turn in your old 386 while you are at it.
The short version: 1) Copyright does NOT give an absolute monopoly over a creative work. 2) Infringement is NOT synonymous with "theft".
Until people understand these two very basic facts about copyright they won't be able to understand more complex issues that crop up in debates about so-called "intellectual property." Copyright in the US gives specific rights to the copyright holder, but clearly Cooper doesn't understand what these rights are.
One of those rights is to be able to give someone a summary of the copyrighted work.
How ELSE am I going to describe it to someone??
Imagine a web "their way" if you will:
I search Google, for, say, "Iraq baby fodder" and up comes a page of links. JUST links. Nothing else.
Now what am I supposed to do with that?
Would serve them right! Maybe next time they'll shut the heckola up.
All I have to say is to those publishers who place information on the 'Net and don't let search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, etc. summarize the site, place it in a searchable database and let me find it: I won't find what you're trying to show the world.
You might as well keep it in a box in the basement of the publishing company; I'm not going to know about it or find it on my own and it'll just gather dust on the shelf. Spend the money on advertising, or have a search site do it for free for you....
If Cnet had half a clue, they'd stop publishing articles from this moron.
MOST people will support the bands they like by buying their music (iTunes music store is proof even though they use DRM which I refuse to support on principle) because if they like the band, they want the band to survive and make MORE music.
It's not rocket science.
Radio stations used to serve this purpose, but they are so bought and paid for now that they are all but unlistenable.
It disgusts me how the truth about music sales is glossed over.
They SAY the reason they lose money is due to piracy.
I SAY the reason they lose money is because their releases suck and their music is overpriced.
How does this tie in to Web 2.0 and Google? Well, it's illustrative that these news sites are barking up the wrong tree here. Google is helping them get hits because people are seeing links to their sites.
It's not like they are getting the whole story from Google--they are merely getting a summary. I certainly CLICK THE LINK TO THE SITE if I want to read the whole story.
I mean, duh.
This is ridiculous because Google is driving traffic TO their sites, not taking it away. They should be grateful.
JUST LIKE the music industry should be grateful that file sharing helps people discover new bands.
I think the point that is being made about the summary is that some writers work, whether a part or a whole, is being published on a page that he has not authorized and for which the publisher of that page is earning revenue, I.E. - a click on a Google AdWords ad.
Not sure what your profession is but let's say you make pizzas, I come along while your back is turned and take a slice to let some stranger on the street have a taste. I charge that stranger a quarter for that. So if I give tastes to 100 people I make $25, you make nothing. You're saying that's fair? Would you be grateful to me, for taking something you made, giving it to other people and making money off of that? This is what's happening to newspapers and other venues that have copyrighted material.
I have my own website, I publish content to it every week. As a writer, amateur at best, I don't want someone else making money off my work unless they are willing to give me my share. I think that's all any of these copyright holders are saying. Pay your fair share. Nothing in the world is free.
Google's proven that anyone can make money with advertising online. No need to charge on top of that.
So?
The only problem being that all content suddenly because a carrier for advertising so the arbiter of what is or isn't 'newsworthy' suddenly becomes the ad execs. But you are okay with being a nice polite docile consumerist because hey, you save 50 cents.
I find that utterly terrifying.
The concept of "borrowing" CAN NOT exist on the internet naturally when it comes to media and information, unless we consciously implement a system, such as DRM, to enforce these standards. It is neither stealing or borrowing, it is copying. Mass copying is not something that applies in the physical world. No one is going to go out and photocopy a book and give it away, it just doesn't work, mostly because we are limited by time and resources. But on the internet mass copying is something that every person has done every time they downloaded a web page and 1 Million other people downloaded that same web page with that same image and text. This type of distribution would not be possible in the physical world at the same cost. Also, "sharing" a file can not exist nor can "returning" a file. All of these terms: sharing, borrowing, returning, are of a physical nature. They involve physical limitations where only one person can have posession of an object and they describe the transition in one persons posession of that property to another persons property of that object. But in the world of computer, it is different. If I want to give someone else access to a file of mine, then I just e-mail or upload them a copy. It's easy. I get a copy, they get a copy, and that's just how computers function.
Imagine having a "magic sheet" that is huge, like the size of the Titanic. And when you put that sheet over something, and say Abracadabra! then you magically get a copy of that object when you remove the magic sheet. So you go home and you put your cell phone under it, and now you have 2 cell phones. You put your dog under it, and now you have 2 dogs. You put $500 under it and now you have $1000. So then you cover your entire house, and now you have 2 houses. So now you go to the store and cover all of the food with your blanket, and now you have twice as much food. And you don't need 2 houses, or all of this food, so instead you transfer posession/access of these items to people that don't have a house, and who don't have food... You give your dog to someone who really wants a dog and your money to someone who can put it to good use. Would this be wrong if you could physically duplicate all of this? Surely it would be a threat to our economy!!! Now EVERYONE can have WHATEVER they want with out paying for it!! All they have to do is use my magic curtain. You could solve world hunger, produce infinite amounts of gasoline, you could give everyone a home... Is this stealing? I didn't build my home, but I paid for it? If I make a copy of it, is that copy still owned by the person who built it? Is that dog that I made a copy of, not a real dog? Is giving that money to someone who will put it to good use, wrong? I do not think that you realize what I am talking about. This is more then just a concept of what is right and wrong and what is stealing and what isn't. This is an entirely new emergent system that we have never seen before. And right now we are deciding its fate... And all I'm saying... is that what we once thought of as stealing, maybe doesn't apply in this world where supply is unlimited. And what is traditionally wrong, maybe isn't always wrong anymore... and maybe this is a good change, and we should see it from an optimistic perspective and use it to its potential so that we may grow and develop as people. If we take it, and adapt it to make it function under the same physical laws that we have now, then we will be spoiling the very properties that make it so useful and precious. Give it time... and you might see things differently as well...
In my philosophy class we recently discussed this theory of property rights. You will notice that the only environment where property rights are able to exist is in a world of limited altruism and moderate scarcity, which is the world that most of us live in. But on the internet, it is a world of both extreme generousity, where people are willing to go out of their way to make their files accessable to others, and it is an environment of huge abundance, since supply is unlimited and is as easy as copy and paste.
What media companies are attempting to do is to use DRM as a means to create a "Stable Moderate Scarcity" by limiting the number of copies of media that people have access to. This prevents people from carelessly copying and distributing files over the internet and illiminates abundance. Then they attempt to limit how generous people are with their songs by shutting down P2P sites, and suing tons of people for thousands of dollars, and putting everyone else in so much fear of the consequences of being generous, that they are shakin in their boots over sharing a few songs on a P2P network. This helps illiminate generousity and creates a "Stable Limited Altruism".
Now usually in the material world these things are not a factor. If everyone has an abundance of peaches, like TONS of peaches, and I go and steal one from your hand, that's ok because you have hundreds more sitting right next to you. But this pretty much never happens... And when it does, it's things that we don't normally think about like someone taking a pencil or pen from us, when we know we have a box of 250 back at home in our supply closet that we got for really cheap at Office Max on sale for $10 with an extra 20% off.
Extreme generousity happens in situations like family or friends, where there may not be a lot of food, but we are just as worried about everyone else as we are ourselves, and maybe even more so about everyone else. And so even if there is only 1 piece of pie left, and you really wanted it, but someone else wanted it too, so you let them have it and you let yourself be extra generous. This usually only happens in private settings, but for the most part I've observed that most people are good hearted people and will gladly help out a stranger and be extra generous if another person is nice and asks their help.
And so this is what media companies are attempting to do. They also recognize the internet as a place where property rights do not exist, and they are attempting to create rules to do so. It is justified in their motivation to want to get paid for their labor and their "property". But then they should not release their information onto a platform where generousity and endless surplus are everywhere and their information is broadcasted to everyone in such an uncontrolled manner. And consumers do not want to pay for these things. They will, in a state of fear or lack of other options. But they will not do it willingly. And if companies want to get paid, then they need to develop some other model to fund themselves. Advertisements are the best bet right now. And really, making money on information is hard. Look at the YouTube conundrum. How can such a valuable web site that attracts so many consumers, not have a means to produce any major cash flow besides selling itself to Google? Maybe we are no longer consumers. Maybe if property rights do not exist, then neither do business and neither does the business-consumer relationship? Maybe we have nothing we care to offer them... ever... even if we had money, would we pay a monthly fee for things like YouTube or Google Spreadsheets? Maybe some... but I doubt most. We are not consumers. In fact, we are the ones supplying the content, and we are the ones giving access to it. We are business, we are content, we are government, and we are the internet. And the natural laws of the internet exist in such a way that I feel we can benefit from them. We do not need capitalism on the internet. Maybe a capitalistic internet is an oxymoron? Every company comes here looking for money and all they find is surplus and generousity and they are discusted with it and want to change it??? The majority of people on the internet, who make the internet and expand the internet, are not the ones whose morals are malfunctioning. It is these companies that seek to put limitations on the naturally fragile and precious properties of this newly emerging system. The internet is an amazing thing that we have created, but we don't completely understand. It is a conscious living thing. The billions of neurons in my body and head are to my consciousness, what all of the people and computers on the internet are to a higher consciousness. An emergent system that we create in the same way we are based on emergent systems. Maybe we don't think of ourselves as little neurons supporting a bigger living thing, but I'm sure neither do the cells in my body. They only know that they are cells and we only know that we are humans. And this whole internet thing... is way more complex then you ever imagined.
If they don't, and they make themselves extinct, that's their problem.
Nice fantasy. The internet is nothing like that at all. Let's take a quick look at what piracy has been and is today. modern music piracy began with the first reusable media: Audio tape. The rules set down in that age was that as long as you weren't mass producing copies of music against copyright, you were ok. The minute you mas produce copies of something you become a pirate. The same thing happened after videotape was introduced. Movies have at the beginning a statement that it's illegal to copy, in whole or in part, the material you are about to watch. Again, the general rule was you could copy something, but the minute you begin mass producing it, you violate copyright. The law on this is rather draconian, but necessary to curb illegal activity.
Now, we have the internet. Using your analogy and comparing it to what the law says, it becomes very clear that copying a copyrighted file is out and out stealing. The person who provided the file is guilty and the person who chose to copy the file is guilty of piracty. Basic economics tells you the in order to enter into commerce one must have something that others are willing to compensate for, in this case, Music or Movies. These are both commodities, and are governed under copyright laws that give sole ownership to the one who produced it.
Enter the lowly internet user with a fast connection and a dvd/cd burner. The only way this user can justify using his equipment to copy anything is to appeal to the masses, IE, consensus gentium, since the consesus is it's ok to download music and movies and not pay for them. One person rips a copy of a movie, say it's borrowed from the library, then makes that copy available on the internet for others to burn copies of to dvds. The consesus of the masses may be that this is ok, but under black letter law, it's illegal.
It doesn't matter that the nature of the internet is "copying". If you look at the bottom of any website you'll see a link that says "terms of service", which spell out what a user can do with the content they just downloaded. This is how the internet is.
Just because you can use the internet a certain way doesn't mean you should.
So, while it could be argued that Google stole copyrighted material and profited from the act, a more lenient outlook would be that Google's bots checked for permission to troll the site and tacitly got it.
My personal take is that the Belgian site didn't do enough to protect its content. A few lines in a text file is all it would have taken. I see this as not a victory for the protection of intellectual property and copyright, but of the continued exercising of lawsuits in place of common sense.
By your logic they should be charging you for driving readers to your site.
get a clue!
It would really help the quality of debate on this site if people refrained from personal attacks in their postings and focused on the issue being discussed.
How apparently intelligent people can fail to see the benefit google is providing to content holders is quite frankly beyond me.