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Google Accused of Violating Copyright In China
angry tapir writes "The Chinese Authors Society has demanded that Google present a resolution plan by the end of the year and quickly handle compensation for Chinese authors whose books the US company has scanned without permission as part of its Book Search program. A local copyright protection group, co-founded by the authors group, has said it found at least 17,000 Chinese works included in Google's scanning plan."
C'mon they copy everything...
under the acta google will be down in less then 1 hour
For all the rampant piracy the chinese government ignores, google can't just ignore their IP rights - china will end up blocking them and they'll all start using yahoo or bing. Would be nice if they could stick it to them and say that the copyright doesn't apply in the US or something but really, you just can't with these people.
Is this really about copyright?
Absolutely. The way the world works is, when you are the underdog you "steal" the IP of all the countries around you until you achieve some level of economic parity, and then you hypocritically pull the ladder up behind you to try and prevent anyone else from doing the same.
America did it. South Korea did it. Now, China is doing it. It's about preserving economic hegemony, nothing more.
"Freedom is better than a tyrannical government."
Are you talking about China, or the 95-120 year copyright monopoly enforcement (with a potential 5 year jail time for copying silent films from the 1920's)?
"Hello, my name is China and I wish to liquidate all my US Treasury Bonds."
Exactly. Someone who finally gets it.
China has something like $1 trillion of our debt. If they dumped it - and they're not against this tactic - we'd all long for last year's economic downturn.
They fucking own us. Literally and figuratively.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
*Whoosh!* There goes the point right over your head. Big content is stealing from you.
They're taking your history and your heritage. Imagine a ludicrous extreme, such as the hospital you were born in saying that you can no longer use the name that you were given at birth unless you pay for it because it happened on their premises, therefore they own the rights to it. Or if you are in immigrant, imagine someone telling you that you can no longer describe where you're from, because that information is "owned" by the country from which you came. (God forbid you draw a map!)
Similarly, the music that was on the radio when I was a child? I'm prohibited by law from sharing that with my friends. Movies that have become so deeply ingrained in our culture that we constantly refer to them... "May the force be with you." "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more." "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" Yeah, in spite of them being part of the very fabric of our culture, you're legally prohibited from sharing them with your kids without paying your pound of flesh to people who did something great decades ago (or in some cases, to estates of long dead people).
Look, I'm all for compensating artists justly for what they do. In 1962, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr released a clever little song called Love Me Do. It was a bona fide hit, and they made a lot of money off of it. So be it, they deserve it. But now it's 47 years later. Do you really contend that the song was so unbelievably great, so untouchably amazing, that Paul, Ringo, and the estates of George and John should STILL be making money when a radio plays it?
Or let's look at it another way. Don't you think that's being way too overgenerous to artists? I mean, these past few years, I've been doing some of the greatest work in my professional life in a computer datacenter. I've gotten consistently great reviews, and I feel like I've made a real positive difference for the company where I'm employed. They've paid me well, I'm not complaining. But if I walked out tomorrow, wouldn't you agree that it's kind of silly to expect them to STILL keep paying me because they're enjoying the fruits of my labor while I worked there? 50 years after I'm dead, should they STILL be paying my estate because my contributions in the first decade of the 2000's contributed to the history of the company being great?
When I retire, I'm going to be living off of money I've saved up during my lifetime specifically because I don't expect my former employers to still be paying for my work 70 years after I die. Why is it that an artist who writes a hit song, a writer who writes a best-seller, an actor who turns in an Oscar-winning performance, gets that luxury? My opinion is that if you want to continue making money off of your work, get out there and work like the rest of us do. No one should get a lifetime + 70 years of resting on their laurels because they did something great. Like the rest of us, if they want to retire in comfort, they should set aside some of the money they make during the height of their popularity so they'll have it after the limited time that copyright is supposed to be valid.
Not quite... They own $1 trillion of our virtual currency
In exchange we got a lot of their material goods
If they abruptly ended the relationship one day and called in our debt, we would just default and they'd be left with nothing.
What option would they be left with? Go to war? Fat chance -- wars nowadays are fought with technology, not numbers of soldiers... and we spend almost as much as the rest of the world *combined* on defense (we spend $600 billion a year on military, whereas China is the 2nd highest with under $90 billion a year)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures#Stockholm_International_Peace_Research_Institute_figures
In the meantime, we would still have their manufactured items, and we'd just take our IP (read: engineering designs) to Malaysia or some other place (e.g. Mexico) for our manufacturing needs.
They don't "own us" -- it's a mutually beneficial relationship that requires both parties to take part.
Every country that plays the "globalization" game gets the benefits from and the dependency on every other player. As it stands now, they depend on us just like we depend on them. That could change, but it'd likely be a gradual change, or else a painful change for *both* sides.
They fucking own us. Literally and figuratively.
If you owe the bank $100,000 they own you, but if you owe the bank $1,000,000,000,000 you own them.
China's fate is just as wrapped up in the value of that debt as our own is.
How exactly do they get them to the US shores?
Wait! Whats a sig?
Yeah, that's your brilliant response to everything. Owe money? Shoot the people you owe money to. Need oil? Occupy and destroy the countries that have. And you wonder why we think you're all batshit insane over there.
-- Linux user #369862
Aside from the typical /. China bashing, why is anyone here surprised by this at all?
I mean, if you keep pressuring a country to "enforce IP rights" and keep spreading propaganda, uh, educational message about how many billions was "lost" due to IP rights violations. Is it that a surprise that the group of people who stands to gain the most would be responding, who those who stand to lose money will drag their feet?
Are so many /.ers here so blinded by their anti-China prejudice that you cannot even realize that with over 1 billion people, there will be different groups of people with different agenda? What's the point of lumping this authors' guild with software pirates in this discussion?
What's more, isn't this exactly the case for American companies to demonstrated how IP rights should be respected? Or will this be another demonstration of pure greed? Do you think anyone in China is going to take "IP rights" seriously (there are few enough who does so, but supposedly we want that to change, right?) if Google demonstrates that US companies are just going violate others right when it suits them?
Oliver.
The content industry plays lip-service to the issue, they insist that there is a public domain but when every work is at least life of author plus seventy-five years or so there is in reality no public domain from my life's point of view.
The answer is to instantly kill anyone who makes a really good movie, or a book, and then just patiently... wait...
On your rocking chair on the porch, with a happy, knowing smile on your face.
Actually he might have a small point somewhere in there. Content creators are standing on the shoulders of giants, using centuries worth of stories and history as inspiration, then claiming the 'idea' as their own - essentially demanding payment for re-using our culture and all the while locking it up so much that it will never enter our domain again. They are pulling up the ladder behind them, while claiming moral superiority.
They may deserve a bit of cash for their time in re-writing the story to meet modern standards - but they have no right to keep it out of our hands for centuries to come.