Google Wins the Filesharing Wars?

The Importance of writes "Compulsory licensing schemes such as those proposed by the EFF have been critiqued, but now LawMeme has an interesting article that claims Google will win the filesharing wars if a compulsory license is adopted."

Comments

Wrong and right

[heironymouscoward]

I don't believe the P2P companies are asking for compulsory licensing because they believe it is a good thing. I think they want it because then they can claim "we are seeking a legal alternative", knowing full well that although some kind of legalized P2P sharing is inevitable, it will take 5-10 years and the emergence of new media groups for it to happen, not some court ruling that "Hey, it's OK to download those trax now, d00ds!"

However, I agree with the other half of the article, which basically says "Google is God", something that has been obvious for several years. For many people, Google is the Internet, something AOL and MSN never managed to do with their fluff-filled "portals". Whatever new things come along, Google will be there, doing them better, leaner, faster,...

But it will be several dotcom lifetimes before Google will be the place to go to download no-longer-pirate tracks and movies. I don't think the P2P companies really have such a long horizon.

Re:monopolist

[Talez]

Google Watch always verged on the "tin foil" brigade to me.

They still trumpet on about the Google Toolbar being spyware despite the fac that when you install the toolbar it spells everything out in plain english under a big red heading labelled "READ THIS CAREFULLY! IT'S NOT THE USUAL YADA YADA YADA!".

They still trumpet on about Google's immortal cookie yet fail to realise *gasp* Google does have user preferences and uses the cookie to track those preferences. Some small part of me believes that the Google reps never responded because they died laughing about... THE COOKIE.

They trumpet on about geotargeting but in reality its almost required by governments with lax freedom of speech policies who try to prevent their citizens from accesssing certain material. You can always turn it off in the prefs by telling google to go back to google.com for searching but now the legal onus is on you.

While the site does have some valid points, most of them are either overexagerations or crying sour grapes. Personally, I think the only thing that really needs to be addressed is Google's transparency. Sure it's a fairly big concern to address but Google hasn't steppped far out of line yet. If they were to say, for example, sell every user's personal search data to the highest bidder I would be incredibly pissed and be calling for their blood.

But they haven't.

So I won't. And I'll continue to use Google while they remain like they are.

Google's Predestiny?

[plasticmillion]

I disagreed with pretty much the entire article, but one point in particular stood out: the assertion that Google is destined to dominate a world where copyrighted content can be legally distributed. This shows deep ignorance on the part of the author as to the reasons for Google's current success.

Specifically, the problem of indexing the web is an extremely thorny one. There is a massive amount of content, almost none of which has any structure whatsoever, and much of which is of dubious interest (i.e. it's total crap). The page rank system used by Google is simply brilliant and deserves all the accolades heaped on it.

Indexing a bunch of MP3s is a much, much simpler problem. As the author of the article points out, Napster had this pretty much nailed years ago. So Google's technical advantage is definitely questionable. What about its deep pockets, market presence, etc.? Sure, this indicates that Google might be a contender in this theoretical new market, but there are a couple of other companies out there with brands, deep pockets, etc. Say IBM, or eBay, or Amazon, or Microsoft, or Yahoo, or... okay, you get the point.

To me this article is a perfect example of attracting attention by taking a superficially intriguing stance, basing it on today's much-hyped company to gain topical interest. Upon examination, the conclusions of the article don't hold water.

Slashdot

[Sphere1952]

Slashdot is a P2P network. Every message put here is just as much copyrighted as the latest hit by Stupid Band of The Week, or that eBook you want to get your hands on.

Compulsory licencing will end up being a tax on speech.