Google (GOOG) has been getting hosed lately on the copyright issue (see Viacom’s displeasure (VIA)), and today Microsoft (MSFT) sought to deliver another swift kick to its rival when it’s already down. (Well, relatively speaking. The stock is still holding steady at $450 a share.)
The timing of it all smacks the Browser as being a tad opportunistic: Yesterday Microsoft released the text for its associate general counsel’s speech in New York today, in which he says “companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the back of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising and initial public offerings.”
Techdirt thinks Microsoft looks dumb because it’s trying to link Google’s book-scanning project with YouTube as evidence of the search giant’s profound disprespect for intellectual property rights. But the two scenarios pose different legal questions. With the books, Google is itself taking print content and putting it online. With YouTube, it’s serving only as a platform, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quite clearly protects sites from becoming liable for what its users do, with some exceptions but not many.
In any case, this isn’t the first time someone’s accused Google of freeloading. This sounds a bit like the network neutrality debate, in which the telcos have accused Google of making money off an expensive network infrastructure it didn’t spend a penny to build.
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