Megaupload Indictment Shows That Google Does Actively Police Against Its Ads Showing Near Infringement
from the oh-look-at-that... dept
One small point in the Megaupload indictment is worth calling out for reasons that have little to do with the case at hand. It seems that it's become vogue in Hollywood over the last couple of years to blame Google for everything. You see all sorts of stories claiming that Google is the main cause of "piracy" and conspiracy theories bizarrely claiming that Google was the main force behind stopping SOPA/PIPA because it "profits from piracy." There are tons of stories claiming that Google refuses to pull ads from sites that engage in widespread infringement. But... right there, smack dab in the middle of the Megaupload indictment is the fact that, pretty early on, Google dumped Megaupload because a review of the account found lots of infringing content:On or about May 17, 2007, a representative from Google AdSense, an Internet advertising company, sent an e-mail to DOTCOM entitled "Google AdSense Account Status." In the e-mail, the representative stated that "[d]uring our most recent review of your site [Megaupload.com,]" Google AdSense specialists found "numerous pages" with links to, among other things, "copyrighted content," and therefore Google AdSense "will no longer be able to work with you."Note that this in May of 2007... way before the widespread claims by Hollywood folks began saying that Google turned a blind eye to any infringement it found. Seems like this part of the indictment suggests otherwise.
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Filed Under: ads, cyberlockers, infringement
Companies: google, megaupload
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key word links
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What is your First Name? was strangely ...
What is your Jason?
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http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/24/tech/social-media/google-plus-nicknames/index.html?eref=mrss_ igoogle_cnn
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Double Dipping
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Well, of course
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I might consent to my program being on Megaupload. But Megaupload doesn't have any coypright interest in the work, maybe an express or at least implied license.
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Not an entirely unfair response given Google's forfeiture of $500 million in profits from promoting illegal pharmacies. Go look at some of the other sites running ads from Adsense. Google hardly has clean hands.
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And the RIAA, MPAA and the rest do?
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"Not an entirely unfair response given Google's forfeiture of $500 million in profits from promoting illegal pharmacies. Go look at some of the other sites running ads from Adsense. Google hardly has clean hands."
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"Google Inc. has agreed to pay $500 million to settle a U.S. government investigation into the Internet search leader's distribution of online ads from Canadian pharmacies illegally selling prescription and non-prescription drugs to American consumers..."
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/08/24/AP-Google-Settles-for-500M-in-Pha rmacy-Ad-Scandal.aspx#page1
Google (and other search engines that weren't taken to task, most likely) apparently was violating some kind of law against importing medication, but I kinda get the impression that the law is about protecting overpriced US drugs from strapped Americans looking for more affordable meds.
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If we want to give them patents, fine, but there needs to be some guidelines.
No patents on anything that receives any help from government funding.
I want independent auditors auditing their costs so that we can better determine how much they spend on R&D and tailor patent lengths accordingly. You want free market capitalism, abolish patents. You want a government established monopoly it should be tightly regulated and the public has a right to know how well those regulations are working.
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Bingo.
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Under current copyright law, everything set down in a fixed form has a copyright. Even what I'm writing here (may, depending on whether or not is is just facts) now has a copyright. The vast majority of web pages that Google crawls and indexes (and they store in their archives) are copyrighted.
When will the insanity stop????
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Don't google themselves argue, reasonably, that without the copyright holder actively informing a host site that there is no way to know if content is infringing or not?
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Multiple Readings
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Jan 24th, 2012 @ 9:04am
The point its that services like google should not be pandering too the kind of ignorant fools who believe you can just look and see to know that any particular piece of content is infringing.
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I don't think the question is 'can they' because obviously with enough time and man hours anything is possible. The question is 'do we want to force them too with threats of civil liability or criminal culpability' and that question is two fold. First, do we really want laypersons making decisions like what is and is not infringing? That's certainly going to invite a very limited reading of legality due to the risks involved. Copyright isn't a simple 'is this legal or not' situation after all since the manner of the material's use is what determines legality, not merely the use itself. This calls into question both google's own due diligence as well as any information from aggrieved parties since it's easy to make mistakes and aggrieved parties have a history of over estimating what is and is not a legal use. Second, is it really worth driving up the costs of providing any kind of service on the internet with these added responsibilities? Enforcement is not free and considering the purpose of copyright it's not entirely clear that it's worth the cost to these third parties to aid by manually policing in this manner.
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You're missing the point!
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStandards
The whole POINT of this is to show that Megaupload is such a dastardly bunch of seal-clubbing, baby-kicking, puppy-skinning ghouls that even a corporation as EVIL as Google is disgusted by their nazi-like behavior!
You know - like how the Joker (Google) refused to work with Red Skull (Megaupload) the Nazi against Batman (MPAA/RIAA).
See? it fits!
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Google is the number one site to go to for finding anything.
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google
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