Tech-savvy users will always be able to outflank some sort of filtering scheme. Maybe Google is relying on this--doing the absolute minimum as required by Chinese law and hoping that the users will be able to find and exploit workarounds which give them access to non-filtered results. Maybe they're even leaving backdoors open on purpose.
If this were the case, clearly they'd have to maintain to the Chinese Government (and hence to the general public) that they weren't trying to make it easy to circumvent the filtering.
So maybe they aren't being evil after all. On the other hand - maybe the are. The nature of the scenario pretty much guarantees that we'll never really know.
Maybe that would be the case if "Shop" weren't such a common word and wasn't used here in a manner relevant to it's commonly accepted meaning.
For example, MS has a monopoly on the use of "Windows" as a name for a computer operating system. That doesn't mean that they can sue anyone who uses "Window" as part of the name of their software program.
In this case, "Shop" can be construed to be a place where one works and "GIMPShop" is a place where one works with GIMP. If Adobe hadn't chosen such a common word as part of their tile, then this would be an issue for a lawsuit, but as it is I don't see much happening.
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Tech-savvy users will always be able to outflank some sort of filtering scheme. Maybe Google is relying on this--doing the absolute minimum as required by Chinese law and hoping that the users will be able to find and exploit workarounds which give them access to non-filtered results. Maybe they're even leaving backdoors open on purpose.
If this were the case, clearly they'd have to maintain to the Chinese Government (and hence to the general public) that they weren't trying to make it easy to circumvent the filtering.
So maybe they aren't being evil after all. On the other hand - maybe the are. The nature of the scenario pretty much guarantees that we'll never really know.
Maybe that would be the case if "Shop" weren't such a common word and wasn't used here in a manner relevant to it's commonly accepted meaning.
For example, MS has a monopoly on the use of "Windows" as a name for a computer operating system. That doesn't mean that they can sue anyone who uses "Window" as part of the name of their software program.
In this case, "Shop" can be construed to be a place where one works and "GIMPShop" is a place where one works with GIMP. If Adobe hadn't chosen such a common word as part of their tile, then this would be an issue for a lawsuit, but as it is I don't see much happening.