Piracy

Ever since Google announced it suffered a cyber-attack from China, Google's legendary PR machine has gone into overdrive, opportunistically framing the conflict as a good versus evil story, and positioning Google as the Internet's benign superpower defending free expresssion, and as a new kind of business that puts morality before money.   

• Google understands it is easy to politically demonize China, because China's pervasive censorship and trampling of fundamental freedoms and human rights offend all freedom-loving people.

However, those willing to look behind the curtain of Google's self-serving political rhetoric here, will discover that many of the attributes that offend so many people about China, Google shares to an unfortunate extent.

• Let's review four significant strategic similarities between Google and China -- brought to you in Google's own words.

First, Google's leadership, like China, has affirmatively chosen to not be democratically accountable.

Wow. The evidence Viacom unearthed in discovery in their $1b copyright infringement suit against Google is surprisingly damning. The evidence shows willful, premeditated, deceptive, and organized efforts by YouTube, Google and Google-YouTube to infringe copyrights for anti-competitive and financial gain.

• Read the quote summary first here, then review the copious evidence/history in the 86 page Viacom Statement of Facts here, and then review Viacom's Summary Judgement memo of law here. 

So what are the broader antitrust implications of all this new and serious evidence of illegal activity and misconduct by Google-YouTube?

First, DOJ really blew it for not even asking for a second request of information on Google's acquisition of YouTube.

First there was one-to-many broadcasting, then many-to-many Internet narrowcasting... now it appears we are moving next to a one-to-many GoogleNet unicasting future...

• ...where every company and individual may simply become a subordinate channel on the Googleopoly advertising network, 
• and where content largely would be found only via Google's mono-search guide...

To better understand this troubling ongoing transformation, connect the dots below...

A potential flood of very illuminating documents and information about the inner workings of Google are likely to be released soon by the Federal Court hearing Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google-YouTube, despite strong Google opposition to the court's release of the information Viacom found in "discovery."

It appears Google Buzz' privacy fiasco has generated a different kind of "buzz" than Google had hoped for.

• Two different groups, Comedy.com and WSJ.com have created hilarious videos on Google Buzz.
  1. Don't miss Comedy.com's video "Google Threatens to kill users".  
     • (2 min 3 seconds and don't miss the ending) 
  2. Also don't miss the WSJ.com's video "You're a Bossy Pants, Google" by Peter Jeffrey.
     • (1 min 41 seconds)

If you enjoy these, there are other links to more short humorous videos on Google at the humor page of my watchdog site www.GoogleMonitor.com from The Onion, The Big Honkin, and The Vacationers among others.

Of the dozen or so humor entries at http://googlemonitor.com/content/sections/humor/ my personal favorites are:

• "Google Roommates Episode I" from the Big Honkin (3 min 3 seconds); and
• "The Google Opt-out Village" from The Onion Network (2 min 9 seconds).

  Enjoy and pass them along.

   

   

   

   

   

Most have missed that there's a big antitrust showdown happening this week. 

• February 4th, the DOJ must file a second round of comments on the Google Book Settlement 2.0 with Federal District Court Judge Chin, after Google almost completely ignored DOJ's substantial legal objections in its Book Settlement 2.0 revision.   

The Google-DOJ showdown in a nutshell:

• The DOJ's 9-18-09 Statement or Interest made clear DOJ believes the settlement is likely illegal under three completely different bodies of law (class action, copyright and antitrust), and also may be per se illegal in multiple different ways. (analysis here.)
• Google and the other parties, in their 2.0 revision of the Book Settlement, almost completely ignored the DOJ's stated legal concerns.
• If Google and the parties do not address the DOJ's concerns in advance of the DOJ's second statement of interest filing due February 4th, the DOJ will be thrust into law enforcement mode.     

This is a big deal.

• The DOJ has drawn a line in the sand that the Google Book Settlement as configured is illegal and anticompetitive.

January 27, 2010

For Immediate Release

Contact: Scott Cleland

703-217-2407

Media@GoogleMonitor.com

GoogleMonitor.com Launches Today

Will spotlight Google’s lack of transparency and accountability

The theft of Google's source code is the under-appreciated and under-reported new development in Google's big announcement of Google's "new approach to China" and its apparent decision to withdraw its business from China if China continues to insist that Google censor search results for in-country Chinese.  

• Google: "In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google." [Bold emphasis added]

FreePress, which philosophically opposes competition policy, effectively is mocking antitrust law and authorities by cynically feigning to care about antitrust and competition in calling for an antitrust investigation of "TV Everywhere" efforts to enable authenticated paying video customers the additional convenience of accessing their paid-for content on any device at no extra cost. 

• FreePress is misrepresenting its latest report -- "TV Competition Nowhere" -- as antitrust analysis when it is standard FreePress villain-ization of broadband and media businesses.   

In their own words, FreePress is anti-competition, anti-property, and anti-business. 

I kid you not. Google's latest antitrust defense, from the mouth of Dana Wagner, Google's lead antitrust lawyer, is: "We want to be Santa Claus. We want to make lots of toys that people like playing with. But if you don't want to play with our toys, you've got us."

• See the quote for yourself at the very end of a Globe and Mail article entitled: "Google: we're not evil and we're not a monopoly either."
  • Google's Mr. Wagner continues: “In a West Coast company run by engineers, I don't think there was much attention paid to being in Ottawa, being in D.C. and telling your story,” Mr. Wagner says. “If you don't tell your story, other people do it for you.”

Let me attempt to unpack the irony of this new story/metaphor of which Google has taken ownership. 

Most companies when they tell their corporate "story" try to "put their best foot forward," but no one but Google would think to try and slip jolly megalomaniacal corpulence down the narrow chimney of public credibility.  

Only Google would have so little real-world self-awareness as to choose to wrap itself in the beloved mythical role of Santa Claus who has the unique power to decide who has been good or "evil" during the last year, and the unique power to reward those who have been "good" in Google's eyes with toys and punish those who have been "evil" with coal in their stocking. 

Only Google would think it was good PR to allude to Google's secret search algorithms and auction "quality scores" as a worldwide "naughty and nice" list.