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Ballmer Sounds Off
PreacherTom writes "Steve Ballmer shares his thoughts on the Web 2.0 phenomenon, Zune, XBox, Vista, Bill's upcoming 2008 retirement, the future of Microsoft, and other subjects. For example, regarding the GooTube deal: "Right now, there's no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion. And what about the rights holders? At the end of the day, a lot of the content that's up there is owned by somebody else. The truth is what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google." He's blunt, if nothing else."
Microsoft and Vista are irrelevant... and he just can't stand it... they're jealous and they're trying to lash out at anything they can't control.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Anyway, he's only pissed off because Microsoft wants all that money and Google's proving to be a better player of the game of Monopoly. And they don't charge you $400 when you land on Park Avenue. It's kind of interesting to watch a company with the motto of "Don't be Evil" running circles around a company whose motto has to be "Be Evil" based on everything the've done in the past couple of decades. Microsoft used every dirty, underhanded trick in the book to protect their monopoly status and Google waltzes in and beats their pants off just by making cool things and pretty much ignoring their competition.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Fucking Steve Ballmer is a fucking pussy, I'd win a game of chair tossing against that old man any day of the week.
>Hard, of course, for Google/Youtube to argue that something was not noticed if it's being downloaded very much at all.
>I'm sorry, did you just claim that anything which is being downloaded by many people must be illicit material? You, sir, are an MPAA schill.
You missed the argument. Here it comes again: it's hard for Google/Youtube to say they had no knowledge of any infringing material that becomes wildly popular. Youtube has tons of popular copyrighted downloads which are used without the owners' consent. Do you see the point?
(A)
(i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;
(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;
>Nothing in here says that Google are required to search for infringing material themselves. They merely have to respond >when they notice it.
You're getting warmer, but still haven't read the law. RTFL! Try reading the excerpt VERY SLOWLY, and maybe MORE THAN ONCE because there are 3 conditions under which they are legally covered. You summary of those conditions is incorrect and incomplete.
>Oddly enough, Google have been doing this for years - it's something that appears in just about every other one of their products in more or less the same manner. And yet, strangely, they have not been sued into oblivion yet, despite the large amount of 'infringing' material which is present both in the Google search engine and its caching service. Despite all the media cartels making noises about this a few years back, nobody has successfully sued Google about this at all. It's a safe bet that they know what they're doing by now.
Further ignorance. Try reading relevant case histories - I know reading is not your strong point, but you just might learn something!