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Google Inc. has set aside about $187.5 million of the approximately $1.65 billion it’s paying for video-sharing site YouTube Inc. for unspecified current or future losses, it said Tuesday.
YouTube has sent Michael Arrington, owner of Techcrunch a Cease & Desist letter. His offence? Creating a tool that lets you download YouTube videos, like several other sites have done.
Google could be preparing to fight copyright lawsuits related to its acquisition of YouTube by setting aside over $200 million in escrow for a year. In a statement Monday announcing
Australia’s proposed copyright rules could put Australia back in the dark ages of the internet by requiring that search engines procure permission to index and cache webpages before proceeding. Currently Google and other search engines allow you to opt out of being indexed via robots.txt files and other methods. This new law would force search engines to get permission before indexing anything. This is reminiscent of the nutcases in Belgium who are taking a similar stance. I don’t know what these people are thinking, honestly.
Via Search Engine Watch & Yahoo.
Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, a company that sells supplies to make tubes, has had problems with YouTube. Their website utube.com has effectively been DDoSed by people looking for YouTube, causing it to be unavailable to its customers.
Universal Tube claims that since they were in business before YouTube, that YouTube is at fault for having a similar name that sends misled visitors their way.
Interesting that most webmasters are looking for traffic, and UTube.com wants less.
What I would have done, is thank my stroke of luck that got me all this traffic, and monetize it. I’d just move the site to a server that can handle the traffic, and put a special notice at the top of the site, not to obtrusive, but something along these lines:
I think they’d be pretty happy with the results.
I just checked it out and I got a nice “Service Unavailable” error. But what do they think they’re doing? The publicity that comes from this lawsuit will multiply their traffic even more.
Utube- feel free to take this idea and run with it. You can send me 10% of your profits as a thank-you.
Via BBC.
Mark Cuban has posted a long bit on the intimate details of the YouTube buyout and copyright infringement issues. Take a read.
Let’s take a look at Google’s Privacy policy:
- Google collects personal information when you register for a Google service or otherwise voluntarily provide such information. We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience, including customizing content for you.
- Google uses cookies and other technologies to enhance your online experience and to learn about how you use Google services in order to improve the quality of our services.
- Google’s servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.
Now what does Google do with this information?
- We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
- We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.
- We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
- Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country.
Now let’s move over to another topic. Google Analytics. Over the last ten months or so since Google aquired Urchin and renamed it Google analytics, *a lot* of websites have started using this free, organized, intuitive web statistics program. Google Analytics sets a couple of cookies for tracking and to keep it short, Google is pulling a lot of data about how all of us move about on the internet. Let me explain.
Let’s talk about Joe Blow. He visits wakes up in the morning and starts surfing. He visits 30 sites before he needs to shower and get off to work. I have not stats on how many sites us Google analytics, but if half those sites, do, then Google is collecting and storing a pretty good picture of Joe’s overall surfing habits.
This is fine, right? Google is the good guy, and they’re only going to use the information to serve up the most relevant ads to Joe. Joe’s fine with this, because although Google makes a killing, the ads are less intrusive because they’re things that Joe is interested in.
Now remember, Joe never saw or agreed to Google privacy policy, but Google has the info.
There’s also another factor. The US government could subpoena information that Google has. So even though Google has the best of intentions, they may not have the last word.
It might be a good idea for sites to start looking for alternative statistics programs.
It’s not often I post about comments, but this extremely relevant and insightful comment on a Slashdot story brings up the point that Google is very dependant on the interpretation of the “fair-use” parts of copyright law. The poster mentions Belgium, where Google was recently challenged about it’s use of webpages. Google caches webpage content and also shows ads next to search results.
With the purchase of YouTube, Google is in a better position to both defend itself and influence copyright law by setting precedences in court. The litigators looking for easy prey in YouTube can now rethink their attacks, taking into account Google’s $10 billion in cash reserves.
Apparently there is come controversy about the satellite images available via Google Earth and Google Maps. India’s former defence minister George Fernandes is quoted as saying
“It is dangerous. There is a reason to worry. This will affect our national security. I will look into it and express my concerns to the government,”
With Google maps, anyone with an internet connection can view many sites around the world, including potentially sensitive images of military sites, nuclear plants, airports etc. These images are not in real time, but could reveal information that some people wouldn’t want public. South Korea and other nations have also expressed similar concerns.
If you want to read some more, there are lots of news stories available. Rediff - United Press Int’l - News 24 - MSN - The Tribune
Internet giant Google Inc. infringed copyright rules by posting thumbnail-size photos from other websites on its search results pages, a US judge said in a ruling issued.
Read more on Yahoo.
On January 24th and 25th a lot of controversy broke out concerning Google’s descision to censor their search results for the Chinese market. I’ve read *tons* of stuff about this now, and here I’ll just give you some links to some of the best resources to make your own decision on this issue. I feel kind of embarrased with Google’s decision, I just hope that they secretly have a plan up their sleeve to turn the tables on the Chinese government and give the Chinese people the real story about their government.
Here are some of the words/concepts that are currently blocked by Chinese gov’t:
But interestingly enough, some other words that you’d think *would* be blocked, aren’t:
This blocking apparently only applies to mainland China- Hong Kong is not subject to mainland China’s laws. In addition to these blocked keywords, China also blocks certain websites such as BBC, Wikepedia, and some well-known proxy servers (used to circumvent blocking). Apparently keyword/website blocking is rather haphazard and if you try hard enough, you can get the information you want even if you’re in mainland China.
EDIT: Here’s Google’s official write-up about the decision to go ahead with the Chinese site. Google in China.
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