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A Look at Google DRM
pcause writes "The Register is reporting on Google's recent announcement of their own DRM. From the article: 'Google's DRM will make its first appearance as part of a new video downloading service. Page revealed that customers will be able to buy TV shows from CBS, NBA basketball games and a host of other content with Google serving as the delivery broker for the video. This move mimics other technology companies - most notably Apple - which have struck deals with large media houses to send video over the web for a fee.' "
There are absolutely NO details in there! Of course, that won't stop slashdot from decrying it as evil, broken, and the worst thing to happen since the great cabbage fart crisis of 1996.
thanks, i guess the "do no evil" is redundant thesedays, much like the US constitution
The US constitution says nothing about what kinds of lawful agreements (called contracts) you can and cannot make with your fellow citizens (or corporations). If you don't like some particular product, then don't buy it.
It would only be a violation of the constitution if the government were forcing everybody to use DRM; but that is not what we're talking about here.
And besides, maybe if they did force everyone to use DRM, it would stop the whole "buy 10,000 email addresses for $10" kind of privacy violations we see rampantly all over the US.
It seems that Google is going to be using DivX and its DRM to get video into lounge rooms and onto portable devices .DivX has a popular codec ,50 Million DivX certified devices and a MPAA approved DRM .The addition of Geencines movies to Google Video is a clear intention of DivX and Google's relationship as Greencine uses DivX for it's streaming and Burn to Rent and Burn to Buy server .
http://www.greencine.com/divxRelease?content=4
According to Divx representatives, the talks are in a very early stage and details still have to be discussed and determined. However, Divx' role in Google appears not be in direct connection with the search engine's announcement of a commercial video download service. Instead, Divx will help Google to move video content across various device types and ultimately onto the TV screen. Of course, content will only be able to be moved, if it carries a digital rights management platform and if devices are "secure. Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice president of product management said that "Google video's goal is to make the world's video content more accessible" to people. "We want to reach a point when consumers can easily access the content that is important to them from Google whenever they want and enjoy that content on a variety of devices."
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/07/divx_google/
It first came to my attention that Google was evil when I did:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=winip&btnG=G
and got See results for Winzip
and see also winipcfg
in the middle of my searches.
They're accounting for the possibility that 'winip' might be a typo for 'winzip' or 'winipcfg'. Given the fact that 'winzip' is approximately 150 times more common than 'winip' (according to googlefight, at least), it's probably not an unreasonable assumption to make. If you search for "winip" (with the quotes) it only looks for exact matches, so doesn't offer up results for possible alternatives. They are actually trying to be helpful, and while it may be annoying to some, you could hardly call it malicious or evil...
According to CNN it currently only supports Windows.
In another distinction from iTunes, Google Video so far works only on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows-based PCs and not yet on Apple's Macintosh computers.
Maybe in the future they'll support Mac/Linux, but it looks like only Windows for now.
I don't mean to come off as some kind of word nazi here, but considering that you got "insightful" points, I feel like I ought to point out that I don't think that redundant means what you think it means. Redundant means that something is not required because it is a duplication of something else (or in the case of a RAID, it IS required because it duplicates something else). I'm pretty sure that you didn't mean to say that the Constitution is no longer needed because something else guarantees our civil rights.
Perhaps a better choice would be obsolete, which means "No longer in use; gone into disuse; disused or neglected".
But to get back to the topic at hand, I have some first hand experience with GOOG, and to me, the whole "don't be evil" concept was a sham from the start. Google got sued because of age discrimination. That's pretty evil to me. I worked at Google for a few months when they were first starting the Adwords program. Most of the temps were let go, but the ones that they considered to be the best were hired on as regular employees. This was all before the IPO, so if you sense some bitterness on my part, you can probably guess why.
When I was shown the door at Google, the young (and gorgeous, I might add) woman told me (I was 32 at the time) that I didn't really fit in with the Adwords group, which was in her exact words "pretty young". I'd have sued too, but I didn't see any way that I could prove that she acutally said that to me.
I have lots of friends that work there, and trust me, there's no one on the planet more evil than a 25 year old millionaire who didn't really earn it.