Gogle forced to pay $125 million
Hard as it may be to believe, there are some people in this world who don’t much care for Google. Yeah, I know, crazy right? Anyway, it turns out that one of the groups of malcontents unhappy with Google’s self proclaimed status as ruler of the Internet, are authors and in particular the American Author’s Guild.
It seems these guys objected to millions of their works being digitized and made available on the internet without any money changing hands. Go figure.
Google’s argument was that it would help the publishing industry: the more people introduced to a book the more money the publishing industry stood to make. Google is not necessarily wrong in this respect, but that doesn’t mean it can just go messing around with other people’s work. Another thing that got various publishing goats was the opt out policy, rather than ask permission, which would have taken google’s army of nerds a long time, they basically said, ‘we’ll go ahead unless you tell us not to’: I burgled your house because you never specifically said I couldn’t.
Anyway, this time common sense won out in the end, something that can’t always be relied upon in Internet land and Google will be forced to pay $125 million to settle the case.
Now, call me naive, but since Google pride themselves on hiring the best of the best, being ‘the smartest guys in the room,’ at all times, surely someone in the company should have seen that, copyright infringement on a massive scale + notoriously litigious professional body = bad.
But hey, what do I know? I’m just a blogger.
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