Piracy

The WSJ is reporting that Viacom has sued Google for $1b in damages for stealing its copyrighted content.

• "YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom said in a press release. "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws."

Kudos to Microsoft for finally making a high profile challenge to Google's "cavalier" approach to copyright as reported in the lead story of the FT and in the WSJ today. It's about time that Microsoft figured out that a key element of Google's phenomenal success is simply that Google does not play by the same rules as other law-abiding companies.

• Google cheats. And Google justifies cheating by claiming their cheating benefits the masses.  
• Most recognize this twisted morality as "the ends justify the means."
• Google's motto is the double negative "don't be evil."
• Google has adopted an almost messianic mission to liberate all the world's information from the bondages of private ownership for the benefit of the masses.
• Specifically, "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
• Google self-deputized itself for this world mission.

Under what authority does Google operate in carrying out its corporate mission?

• Does Google respect U.S. property law? International law? Common law?
• Or does Google-ism redefine these pedestrian legal restrictions of small-minded people and declare to the world that information is free and should be universally accessible to all people?  

Google cheats. and cheating is core to Google's long term business model. Let's review the evidence of Google's cheating:

This morning the PrecursorBlog server of NetCompetition.org was hit and shut down for the day by a targeted and malicious denial-of-service attack.

Net neutrality proponents profess to oppose the "blocking, degrading, or impairing" of any Internet content. They also profess to cherish and want to protect the First Amendment of the Internet -- free speech.

I want to believe that Moveon.org's SaveTheInterent and FreePress had nothing to do with this attack.

I respectfully ask them to publicly denounce this malicious act as the antithesis of their vision for a free, open and democratic Internet.