3 ms·

Excuse me, but despite Google's opposition to SOPA, which was purely motivated by self-interest, they have put themselves firmly in the camp of the copyright ma

by rickmb 15y ago

Excuse me, but despite Google's opposition to SOPA, which was purely motivated by self-interest, they have put themselves firmly in the camp of the copyright mafia. They have been very outspoken in their support for the "fight against piracy", and have regularly implemented "solutions" without any legal obligation to do so. One example being filtering "piracy related terms" from it's autocomplete feature in Google Search. Google actively supports that "dying industry", because certain parts of Google, like YouTube, have a vested interest in good relations with said industry.

jrockway 15y ago
Perhaps, or it could be their answer to "how can we avoid fighting frivolous lawsuits". Remember, Big Content can sue Google for any reason they want to. If Google can placate them and they back off, that might be in their short-term best interest. (I work for Google but know nothing specific about this beyond what I've observed as a user of YouTube.) To me, content filtering seems like a nice bullet point in the "we don't condone copyright infringement" department. It reduces complaints that result in lawsuits, and doesn't really hurt anyone. If anything, it discourages reuse of RIAA/MPAA content and encourages the creation of new free-as-in-speech content, and that's definitely a good thing. Your cat video doesn't need a top-40 soundtrack to be enjoyable! (It's similar to how Microsoft's attempt to lock up the web with proprietary technology resulted in Free Software web browsers becoming usable. Remember the days of "This site only works in IE"? Now pretty much every site works in pretty much any browser. Epic win.)
- mukyu 15y ago
  Their content matching system came about in the middle of a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom. Given that youtube was full of Viacom's assets (such as videos of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) I find it hard to classify such a lawsuit as 'frivolous'. Which makes more sense, youtube implementing a content matching system and running it on all of the videos uploaded or Viacom and every other copyright holder making their own systems (or buying into one) that tries to go through every video uploaded to youtube?

by rickmb 15y ago

jrockway 15y ago

Perhaps, or it could be their answer to "how can we avoid fighting frivolous lawsuits". Remember, Big Content can sue Google for any reason they want to. If Google can placate them and they back off, that might be in their short-term best interest. (I work for Google but know nothing specific about this beyond what I've observed as a user of YouTube.) To me, content filtering seems like a nice bullet point in the "we don't condone copyright infringement" department. It reduces complaints that result in lawsuits, and doesn't really hurt anyone. If anything, it discourages reuse of RIAA/MPAA content and encourages the creation of new free-as-in-speech content, and that's definitely a good thing. Your cat video doesn't need a top-40 soundtrack to be enjoyable! (It's similar to how Microsoft's attempt to lock up the web with proprietary technology resulted in Free Software web browsers becoming usable. Remember the days of "This site only works in IE"? Now pretty much every site works in pretty much any browser. Epic win.)

mukyu 15y ago
Their content matching system came about in the middle of a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom. Given that youtube was full of Viacom's assets (such as videos of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) I find it hard to classify such a lawsuit as 'frivolous'. Which makes more sense, youtube implementing a content matching system and running it on all of the videos uploaded or Viacom and every other copyright holder making their own systems (or buying into one) that tries to go through every video uploaded to youtube?