Publisher Is Pretty Sure Google Could End Piracy (techdirt.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Techdirt is running a story about Square One Publishers Rudy Shur, and his confusion over the DMCA process, and exactly what Google has control over. The story goes: "After being contacted by Google Play with an offer to join the team, Shur took it upon himself to fire off an angry email in response. That would have been fine, but he somehow convinced Publisher's Weekly to print both the letter and some additional commentary. Presumably, his position at a publishing house outweighed Publisher Weekly's better judgment, because everything about his email/commentary is not just wrong, but breathtakingly so.

After turning down the offer to join Google Play (Shur's previous participation hadn't really shown it to be an advantageous relationship), Shur decided to play internet detective. Starting with this paragraph, Shur's arguments head downhill then off a cliff then burst into flames then the flaming wreckage slides down another hill and off another cliff. (h/t The Digital Reader) '[W]e did discover, however, was that Google has no problem allowing other e-book websites to illegally offer a number of our e-book titles, either free or at reduced rates, to anyone on the Internet.'

There's a huge difference between "allowing" and "things that happen concurrently with Google's existence." Shur cannot recognize this difference, which is why he's so shocked Google won't immediately fix it. 'When we alerted Google, all we got back was an email telling us that Google has no responsibility and that it is up to us to contact these sites to tell them to stop giving away or selling our titles.'"

Comments

Liability

[Anonymous Coward]

I've to say, with Square One Titles on Health like Cancer: A Second Opinion, I can only presume that Rudy Shur believes that Square One should be, by extension, guilty of any wrongful death suit that occurs by following the advice given in the books that delay treatments that might otherwise save lives. Because as a publisher of such material, Square One is under a lot more control over what goes into the books they publish that Google has on what content is published by others, even if they're admittedly less than dutiful when it comes to preemptively scrubbing ilegally copyrighted material from the web or otherwise investigating and responding to publisher allegations of such things.

I mean, seriously, do you really want to be casting stones?

Re:Liability

[SuricouRaven]

We should start contacting the pirates too and making sure they know not to distribute this trash. It doesn't deserve to be read at all.

Summarize The Article

[wisnoskij]

Just summarize the article. We don't need to be told what to think by some anon

Re:The elders of the internet

[TheRaven64]

They can do a good job on spam because there's generally consensus about what spam is, and when people see spam they're willing to click on a button that notifies Google that it's spam. This lets them train machine learning algorithms to identify it. That's not the case for piracy - people aren't going to click on a 'this site hosts pirated content' button next to search results. The people who are looking for it wouldn't want it to go away, most other people don't see it, and there's a huge potential for abuse (if such a button existed, I bet a lot of us would click on it for sony.com and so on).

Re:The elders of the internet

[Opportunist]

But Google has a financial incentive not to. Why? Because people want to see the pages that give them free stuff. DUH. And if Google doesn't give them, they will turn away from Google and to the next search engine. And that is certainly the LAST thing Google would want.

And I would not rely on law makers to step in here. Because their incentive to have US businesses lose business to foreign ones isn't too high either. Because people can VERY easily jump ship on this one. If the word gets out that Google doesn't give you the results you're looking for anymore and, say, Yandex does, well, to hell with the US, hello Russia.

Why should real people care more about the country they live in than corporations?