If You Think Google Takes Advantage Of You....

You can always block Googlebot from your site.

In a move aimed at helping newspapers generate new revenue from struggling online operations, the German government intends to require search engines and other Internet companies to pay publishers whose content they highlight....

The proposal was cheered by German publishers, who complain that Internet companies like Google have profited hugely from their content, while generating only scraps of digital revenue.

“In the digital age, such a right is essential to protect the joint efforts of journalists and publishers,” the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers said, adding that it was “an essential measure for the maintenance of an independent, privately financed news media.”

The proposed policy is directed at all search engines and aggregator sites, not just Google, but it's really the bottom line of the big players that has some publisher openly salivating.

It's a fair response that a copyright holder shouldn't have to insert code into its content saying, "Please don't index this," but only to a point. If the companies at issue weren't already profiting from the traffic generated by Google, whether in money or prestige, they are all sophisticated enough to exclude their content from Google's sites and simply do without the web traffic.

Lawyers, Stop Stealing Content!

Google recently implemented an update to its search engine algorithm. The update, commonly known as "Farmer" but also referred to as "Panda", devalues sites and pages that the revised algorithm deems to have little to no unique content. The search engine community refers to the sites the algorithm was intended to affect as "content farms", hence "Farmer": an algorithm update directed at "farms".

I have maintained legal websites for many years, most notably the website ExpertLaw.com. I compiled a significant collection of articles for that website. I wrote the majority of the articles myself, and for the most part they offer solid content. (Some would benefit from being revised, expanded or updated; but as they say, there are only so many hours in the day.)

There are two issues you will confront if you publish materials on the Internet:

• First, you will encounter people who don't understand that copyright law applies to the Internet, and believe that anything online is theirs for the taking.

• Second, you will encounter many webmasters who don't care about who owns or creates content - the web is theirs for the stealing.

Historically, at least in relation to my site, Google has done a reasonable job of distinguishing the original article from plagiarized copies and slightly modified versions that have been posted around the web. With the "Farmer" update, that is no longer the case. Some of my original articles will no longer appear in the search results unless you go to the last page of the search results and click to "repeat the search with the omitted results included." Afterward they may appear on the first page of search results, but thanks to the extent of plagiarism Google is no longer treating my site as the original publisher. Also, even when my site appears in the regular results, at times it will be outranked by (that is, appear in the list of results below) a page that reproduces my original content.

Here's the kicker: A lot of those websites belong to lawyers and law firms.

And when you look at the lawyer websites that contain plagiarized content, it's rare that it's just the one article. Often they will present, without attribution, may articles or excerpts of articles from my site, other sites, or a combination of sites.

Usually when this happens it's because the law firm hired a web designer who believes that the rest of the Internet is theirs to take or steal. Sometimes the law firm will even pay the designer for hours of time allegedly spent creating the content (when in fact the designer spent only a few minutes stealing it.

But lawyers have no excuses when it comes to respecting copyright laws. And as lawyers know, they're responsible for the acts of their agents (leaving aside for the moment that sometiemes the theft is by the lawyer, not an agent.) Sometimes, knowing full well that they had nothing to do with the creating of the stolen content, lawyers will actually attach their own bylines to the articles. How is it ethical to claim to have authored something that was cribbed from the Internet by somebody else (or... by you)?

So lawyers should watch out.

1. If your content largely consists of content stolen from other sites, the "Farmer" update may cause your site to plummet in Google's search results;

2. If you or your web designer have stolen content from other sites, and worse if you purport to have authored that content, you are likely running afoul of your state's rules of professional responsibility.

3. There are a bunch of honest webmasters who are losing web traffic and money due to the conduct of people like you, and we're mad as H-E-Double Chopsticks. Some of us will file DMCA requests with search engines or your web host to try to have your plagiarized content removed. Some of us have registered copyrights for our content and can seek statutory damages. Some of us are lawyers.

If you did not personally author your website's content it's time to review it. Enter pages from your site into Copyscape and see if the same content appears on other websites. Copy portions of sentences from your pages and paste them into Google (using quotation marks) - for example, if you have a passage on your website,

This tool will guide you through the process of reporting content that you believe warrants removal from Google's services based on applicable laws. Completing this form will help ensure that we have all of the information necessary to investigate your specific inquiry and resolve it as quickly as possible.

You could copy a relatively unique excerpt such as "based on applicable laws. Completing this form will help ensure" and run a Google search to see where else it appears.

If your site includes plagiarized content, take it down. Immediately. Or, better, yesterday. You have no excuse.

Addendum: The same goes for when you're posting articles or answers to questions on sites like Avvo. Don't steal text from other people's articles and pass it off as your own analysis. That's dishonest and unethical - if you have to steal somebody else's words to make yourself appear proficient, how can you argue but that your intent is anything but to mislead potential clients who read the article about your knowledge and experience?

(Near-Indefinite) Copyrights And Orphan Works

Congress created a problem with it's succession of bills extending copyright protection - something that it will likely continue to do such that certain works never come out of copyright. Now it proposes making it easy for the same monied interests that profit from those copyright extensions to ignore the copyrights of may of the less famous and less monied. Lawrence Lessig explains:

Congress is considering a major reform of copyright law intended to solve the problem of “orphan works” — those works whose owner cannot be found. This “reform” would be an amazingly onerous and inefficient change, which would unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.
* * *
The bill would excuse copyright infringers from significant damages if they can prove that they made a “diligent effort” to find the copyright owner. A “diligent effort” is defined as one that is “reasonable and appropriate,” as determined by a set of “best practices” maintained by the government.

You know, a better solution might be to return to historic practice, and shorten the duration of copyright protection. Were orphan works a serious problem before Congress decided that copyright protections should be, if the legislative trend continues, one day short of indefinite?

Lessig's alternative, which is far more politically realistic:

Congress could easily address the problem of orphan works in a manner that is efficient and not unfair to current or foreign copyright owners. Following the model of patent law, Congress should require a copyright owner to register a work after an initial and generous term of automatic and full protection.

That's perfectly reasonable, but it might necessitate the monied interests to pay for works that they might get for free under the proposed legislation. So....

Sony's Chutzpah

Since Sony contends that it's "stealing" to copy music from your own CD to your own computer, let's see how they instruct buyers of their MP3 player's to acquire music - Walkman instructional video: How to acquire music.

So you have your brand new Walkman video MP3 player from Sony. Now let's get some music on it. There are two main ways to get new music for your Walkman video player. You can rip CD's that you already own, and you can get music from multiple online stores. So let's rip some CD's.

I just went out and bought a new album. With the CD in the drive, I can navigate Windows Media player to the "rip" tab....

(They next demonstrate how to rip this Sony CD.)

They strangely forgot to mention that their customers who follow their instructions are thieves.

The RIAA Does It Again....

Why are major media companies so eager to brand their customers as thieves?

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

Sure, the music industry knows that very few people are listening to CD's in their portable players - almost everybody now uses an MP3 player - and they have to know that if they could find a way to effectively enforce their notion that every one of these customers is a "thief", CD sales would drop to almost nothing. But away they go....

The Howell case was not the first time the industry has argued that making a personal copy from a legally purchased CD is illegal. At the Thomas trial in Minnesota, Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she said.

Nice.

But lawyers for consumers point to a series of court rulings over the last few decades that found no violation of copyright law in the use of VCRs and other devices to time-shift TV programs; that is, to make personal copies for the purpose of making portable a legally obtained recording.

And that makes sense... except, of course, that Congress in its infinite wisdom has criminalized doing so with most DVD's, as most are recorded in an encrypted format.

It's Public Domain -But He Had Better Be Dressed In Green

With Peter Pan about to (once again) fall into the public domain, Great Ormond Street children's hospital is preparing for the loss of revenue from licensing the story:

A vital source of funding for the hospital will come under threat from January 1 when Peter and his Neverland companions are thrust into the public domain. Author JM Barrie bequeathed all the rights to Peter Pan to the hospital in 1929 and they have provided badly needed funds ever since.

In many senses, Great Ormond Street has been a good steward for the Peter Pan legacy. Unlike companies which directly produce entertainment works, and which may guard their intellectual property at the expense of creativity and innovation, Great Ormond Street has licensed the story for adaptations and sequels which depart markedly from the Barrie original, and from what a media company might deem an appropriate depiction of the story's characters. That said, in my opinion, copyright protections are already too long.

When some order was first brought to global copyright under the Berne Convention of 1886, the intention was to reward authors and the first two generations of their descendants, explains Mark Owen, head of intellectual property at law firm Harbottle & Lewis. Copyright now expires 70 years after an author's death.

But in an age where characters and works survive for longer and in more media than ever before, copyright cut-off points are increasingly coming into question, he adds.

Let's be honest - a miniscule amount of the vast body of copyrighted material is of much interest even five years after publication, and virtually none is of interest seventy years after the author's death. The people who are interested in again extending the protection are companies like Disney, which do not wish to see their earliest works fall into the public domain. Nobody needs to be reminded of the irony in Disney's building its fortunes on public domain works, only to repeatedly and successfully lobby Congress to keep anybody else from doing the same with its own creations.

Meanwhile, Great Ormond Street is trying to prepare for a post-Peter Pan future:

Much of the hospital's hopes are down to Peter Pan in Scarlet, the winner of a competition to become the classic's official sequel. Commissioned in 2004, well in advance of the original's copyright expiry, the new tale by Geraldine McCaughrean has already been translated into 37 lanaguages and printed in 40 editions.

I can't help but wonder if the change of costume figured in to why this particular book was the winner. Depict Peter Pan in green, and you're in the public domain, but if you put so much as a hint of red on his costume.... (Here's a review of the sequel.)

What A Nefarious Scheme - How Dare They Include, Er, Exclude Me!

I know not all publishers are happy with Google's plan to digitize books, but...

Rather than compiling a list of her company's 1,200 titles ("a waste of my staff's time"), Rienner fired off an angry letter to CEO Schmidt. Google responded with a letter agreeing not to copy any of her books. Rienner is unmollified. She worries that she will be cut out of some future digital moneymaking opportunity. "Books are my unique content," she says. "I'm sure the smart people at Google are busy dreaming up all kinds of ways to make money off them.

[eyeroll]

Disney's New Position on Copyright - Full Reproduction is 'Fair Use'

Well, not really.

But it is funny to trace back from this comment, the author of which is a Supervising Web Producer for E! Online, within the context that E! "is owned by a joint venture between Comcast (50%), The Walt Disney Company (40%), and Liberty Media (10%)."

After locking a thread in which somebody suggests that E! Online might be sued for allowing forum participants to post the full text of articles cut and pasted from copyrighted sources, an E! employee expressed, "we are looking into a definite set of guidelines to address these types of threads." When challenged further, the E! employee asserted,

fair use anyone?

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

This inspired the retort, "Posting the entire article is hardly fair use."The E! employee countered,

im not trying to challenge anyone. im just saying its not that clear cut. but we'll leave that up to our legal team. for now, please hang tight. thank you.

Perhaps he should run it past this legal team:

Disney Enterprises Inc. and four other entertainment giants are suing two downtown Los Angeles produce vendors for allegedly selling pinatas bearing unlicensed cartoon characters.

* * *

Once, Disney sued a Florida day-care center that showed paintings of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy on its outside walls. The school took down the pictures.

I'm not meaning to pick on E's staff here - I really mean to pick on Disney.

Google's Copyright Woes

I do find it interesting, as Google is being sued over its Google Print service, how differently online and traditional publishers view copyright - and Google's services. For most online publishers, being included in Google's index is a blessing, bringing both traffic and revenue. It is expected that Google's spiders will attempt to reach any given site, and it is accepted that it is the site owner's responsibility to install a file or line of code which will instruct Google (or any other search engine) not to index its content. It is understood that in the process of indexing content, every major search engine maintains a copy of the code from the page and, again unless instructed otherwise, will display that "cached page" to users of their services.

In the print world, the reaction seems to be anger and fear - how dare Google suggest that copyright owners "opt out" if they don't want Google to maintain a copy of their works on its servers? It will be interesting to see how this pans out - and if as a result of this litigation over printed matter, at the end of the day webmasters will have to expressly invite Google (and other spiders) in before they will be included in search engine results.

Nothing Magical Here....

The Sun and Mirror take on practitioners of the dark arts, in an effort to save Harry Potter. Or something like that. Book 'em, Danno.

Who said anything about throwing books away?

Beyond copyright (which isn't an issue for the initial focus of the scanning, public domain works), and speculation about possible damage to books from the scanning process, the biggest criticism of Google's proposal to scan hundreds of thousands of books from several major university libraries seems to be that the files Google creates may become obsolete.

Another crucial concern is the well-being of the books themselves. Google has developed a scanning technology that the company claims is not destructive. Clearly, Google will need to work closely with libraries to ensure that no books are damaged. It is an illusion to think that the digital versions of scanned books can replace the books themselves.

A participating library will get a free digital copy of every book scanned in its collection. In other words, each library will essentially get a digital backup of a significant portion of its holdings, but it will be critical to remember that printed books are a stable medium, one that has persisted for hundreds of years.

Digital technology is only a few years old, and even in that brief time, the digital world has produced dozens of incompatible, and often unreadable, media formats. The Google project will enhance the usefulness of the books it encompasses, but it in no way will render them obsolete.

Because, as the Detroit Public Library proved, no self-respecting librarian would dispose of thousands upon thousands of books, discarding them (including some rare books, scavenged by collectors) unceremoniously into dumpsters, to free up shelf space. Couldn't happen. Books are forever.

This is a solution?

Many years ago, griping from the music industry resulted in a fee, attached to any blank cassette tape, which is supposed to compensate the music industry for any illegal copies of their music. It doesn't matter if you want to record a business meeting, birds in your back yard, or even to tape yourself singing in the shower - you pay the fee. From time to time I have heard people use this as a rationalization for the bootleg copies they have made - they ask, "Why should it be illegal to do this, when I already paid the fee when I bought the tape?"

Now, in the New York Times, a Harvard law professor tells the music industry to consider getting with the times and, rather than suing people who download music and trying to avoid the new market for downloading, creating some form of blanket license for its recordings.

To its credit, the industry has started to participate in paid music download services like iTunes, but a better solution would be to institute a monthly licensing fee paid by Internet users.

So, beyond the blank tape where you are ostensibly paying a small fee to make up for somebody else's piracy, this professor suggests that it would be a fair compromise to declare that if you want Internet access you should pay a full license fee for all music.

Apparently this professor is not familiar with the copyright and licensing issues involved in music - where there can be many copyright owners for even a single song, based upon authorship, the participation of multiple artists, sampling, and other such considerations - which would cloud the issue of compensation. Or perhaps he only cares that the music conglomerates "get their money", and is less concerned about the artists. But no matter what he intends, if his licensing scheme were implemented and an Internet user were asked, "How much music will you download now that you are required to pay a full licensing fee just to access the Internet?", a fair answer would be, "All of it."