March 6th, 2007
Microsoft vs. Google on copyright infringement
UPDATE: Why Google will never pay for content
Last Thursday, Google offered biggest competitor honors to Microsoft in a quiet SEC required Annual Report public shareholder filing.
Today, Microsoft is set to return the acknowledgement, in its own loud and very public stage way, according to Associated Press reports.
Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people's content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue," wrote Thomas C. Rubin, an associate general counsel at Microsoft, in the speech he planned to give at the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers in New York.
Companies? The number one search engine company, Microsoft nemesis Google.
Google's track record of protecting copyrights “is weak at best," wrote Rubin. Anyone who visits YouTube, which Google purchased last year, will immediately recognize that it follows a cavalier approach to copyright, he indicated.
Google in fact warned of the copyright infringement lawsuit risks it faces in its 2006 Annual Report filed last week.
The Association of American Publishers is suing Google for allegedly improper digitization of books, but supports Microsoft's book scanning initiatives.
Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, defends Google's fair-use/DMCA based business model as providing "more exposure and in many cases more revenue for authors, publishers and producers of content."
