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

The elders of the internet

[fieldstone]

But the Google is emperor of the internet! Everynoob knows this to be true.

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).

What in the fuck?

[ravenspear]

Could someone explain the summary in plain English?

It sounds like something bad happened to someone important but other than that I have absolutely no idea what it is saying.

Re:What in the fuck?

[fustakrakich]

Could someone explain the summary in plain English?

Crybaby publisher is scapegoating Google for for unauthorized distribution of works.

Re:What in the fuck?

[Nemyst]

From what I can gather: publisher is asked by Google if they want to put their books on Google Play. Publisher head refuses, does "detective work" and suddenly arrives in the 21st century, realizing that there are many pirate sites hosting their books. Since the guy used Google to reach those pirate sites, he comes to the conclusion that Google is doing the piracy.

The TL;DR of the summary of the rant is that somebody in a tiny position of power doesn't understand the internet.

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?

Summarize The Article

[wisnoskij]

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

Oh for chrissakes...

[Chas]

1: Google cannot make demands of third party sites to cease selling/distributing (POSSIBLY) copyrighted works.

First off, Google itself, unless it's the actual publisher/author of record, has no standing to make such a demand (request actually).

Second off, Google has NO way of knowing what other ebook sites have coterminous agreements with a given publisher or author.

This is why it's up to the publisher/author to submit DMCA requests to the proper channels. And Google itself isn't a proper channel!

2: This idiot tries to compare it to a store selling knockoff handbags.

First off, these are ebooks, not handbags.

Second off, Google is not "the police" of the Internet. They have no legal standing to do go in and shut these sites down. ESPECIALLY since they have no way of knowing if such a thing would interfere with another distributor's agreements with the publisher/author.

3: Google has no problem going after people who infringe on their own patents.

That's because they're GOOGLE'S patents.

What this imbecile is asking for would be like Google going after you for violating Lockheed Martin's patents.

For someone who is an ostensibly successful publisher, this person shows a SHOCKING lack of knowledge of one of the central legal protections available to him for internet distribution. And it calls into question what other mistaken notions this ignoramus is operating under.

Oh! And now he's just jumped into a large, bright red crosshairs costume and strapped on a blinking neon "Kick Me" sign.