FTC begins antitrust investigation into Google Android, web services - Page 2

roflmao ..... brilliant !!!

[YELP TOS] Which essentially means that they can/ have to authorize others to use "your" writings. So, Google is only in the clear if they have written authorization from YELP.

Be sure to apprise us of the resolution of this perplexing conundrum.

Surely you must have noticed a significant change in the tech environment. Apple is spending an inordinate amount of time and capital defending its IP. There is a heavy emphasis on litigation, patents etc. Since Google has acquired a leading role in all of this, it is natural to report on it.

What are you talking about?

That has been gamed by the SEO crowd to the point of uselessness, at least if you're a legitimate business:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/02/...mmers-winning/

First, Google has actually been accused of manipulating its search results so that competitors, such as Yelp, rank lower in results while Google promotes its own products, such as Google Places, which actually uses Yelp's content. While scraping Yelp's content is a copyright issue, pushing down Yelp in search results and ensuring Google Places ranks high is clearly legal trouble for Google Search. Second, Google Places is being monetized with Google's ad business, which is legal trouble there. Third, why would any company not want to index their website with Google Search? They want visitors to their website, so taking their website out of Google Search results would be shooting themselves in the foot. Perhaps you meant website owners could include code that would prevent the scraping of their content? If so, any such action would also result in a negative impact to their SEO and if Google really wanted the content they'd find a way to scrape it anyway.


It's all intertwined and related because they are favoring their own services in search, which monetize other people's IP. Meanwhile those people are not being paid for their content. "Don't be evil."

Not relevant? OK, I'll come steal your car and park it in my garage. Then I'll tell the government I'm not going to steal any more cars from you so it's not relevant any more. Fair enough?

Google has a history of this - doing blatantly illegal things until they get caught. Then they stop and send out their army of shills to say "it was only an innocent mistake. They're not doing it any more".

If this was the first time it had happened, it would be one thing. But when it's clearly their entire business strategy and they apparently don't have the ethics of a starving raccoon, they don't deserve a break.

Google pulled the Yelp reviews from Places after they got caught red-handed doing it.

Promising to refrain from illegal behavior in the future doesn't excuse the past behavior. It's just an attempt by Google's legal team to minimize the damages they'll have to fork out (no pun intended) for the copyright they already impinged upon.

Remember that the FTC is looking for patterns of behavior in any antitrust investigation. The Google response of "OK, you busted us, we'll stop (now that our competing service has a good foothold in the market)" isn't going to be a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Has anyone read the Terms of use for Google? Its scary stuff!

 

"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."

 

In a nut shell; anything you upload to a google service or even gets indexed via Google can be used and/or altered by Google to make money without having to give you a single penny and there is no option to keep it private.

Yeah... I read this a while ago when studying software licensing in University. Since then I refuse to use Google; I'm surprised no one has touched upon this yet.

 

Compare that to Bing/Windows Live:

 

"Except for material that we license to you, we don't claim ownership of the content you provide on the service. Your content remains your content. We also don't control, verify, or endorse the content that you and others make available on the service.

You control who may access your content. If you share content in public areas of the service or in shared areas available to others you've chosen, then you agree that anyone you've shared content with may use that content. When you give others access to your content on the service, you grant them free, nonexclusive permission to use, reproduce, distribute, display, transmit, and communicate to the public the content solely in connection with the service and other products and services made available by Microsoft. If you don't want others to have those rights, don't use the service to share your content.

With Microsoft, anything you submit, private or public, will not be used by them to make money. The content will only be used by others if you share it with certain people or in public.

Its rare you see Microsoft be the more trustworthy people.

Its not the fact that they're taking it from Yelp, its the fact that it has no Yelp branding at all and no link back to Yelp.

Yelp made the site, supplied the service, and got a user response. Google then took the user response without giving credit to the originator. That is what is wrong here. See Google Terms of Use above.

Edited by benanderson89 - 6/30/12 at 4:18pm

I think you're over-dramatizing what Google Drive permissions actually grant them. TheVerge published an article concering that just a few days after the service rolled out:

Per Google "what belongs to you stays yours." You own your files and control their sharing, plain and simple. Our Terms of Service enable us to give you the services you want — so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can."

Looking at some of Google's competitors, it's clear that they need the exact same permissions — they just use slightly more artful language to communicate them.

 

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2973849/google-drive-terms-privacy-data-skydrive-dropbox-icloud

I could probably agree with "Don't be Stupid".