FT.com / Columnists / John Gapper - Google’s view into the lives of others

FT.com / Columnists / John Gapper - Google’s view into the lives of others

Google’s view into the lives of others
By John Gapper

Published: July 22 2007 18:58 | Last updated: July 22 2007 18:58

Google shows no signs of relenting in its effort to take over the world – sorry, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Last week, it promised to bid $4.6bn (€3.3bn, £2.2bn) or more to run a mobile phone service in the US if the auction is conducted in the way that it wants. It also missed analysts’ expectations for its second-quarter earnings because it was in so much of a rush to employ people that it hired more than it intended.

Eric Schmidt, its chief executive, made clear at Allen and Company’s Sun Valley conference for media and technology executives 10 days ago that resistance to Google is useless. He dismissed the refusal of social networks such as Facebook to let search engines scan their content as a “transient” phase. He also took a potshot at Viacom, which sued Google over its YouTube video-hosting site, suggesting that the media group is simply an outfit run by lawyers.

Comments such as these make me worry that Mr Schmidt, who used to be a mild-mannered and open-minded soul, is becoming too big for his boots. The thing that unites these two remarks is the disdain they imply for anyone wanting to hide details of their private lives, or protect their intellectual property, from Google’s algorithms. They suggest that Google will eventually be able to publish all the data it wants and be justified in so doing. Neither claim is true.

Taking privacy first, young people are more comfortable than previous generations about giving out personal details to all-comers by posting gossip and photos on blogs and social networking sites. That may mark a sea change in social attitudes but it could equally be, pace Mr Schmidt, transient. It will only take a few job rejections or disciplinary actions by employers and universities (Oxford is already trawling for miscreants on Facebook) for privacy to regain its former cachet.

While it is useful for such organisations, and for the nosy, to have the lives of others searchable, it is not always useful for those whose lives are searched. One of Facebook’s appeals is that the site has privacy controls that allow users to share information only among their friends or chosen networks. If everyone’s entry were made “universally accessible” and showed up on Google searches, Facebook would soon lose its appeal to adult users.

Google’s fight with Viacom over breach of copyright on YouTube is analogous: YouTube wants to exploit something to which Viacom holds rights – video clips of programmes such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report – for its own benefit. It hopes to strike deals with companies such as Viacom to display such clips and share the resulting advertising revenue, just as it has already made deals with music companies including Warner and Universal.

Until then, YouTube plays cat and mouse with Viacom over the illegal posting of video clips on YouTube. It warns its users not to upload other people’s copyrighted content but has not put in place a filtering mechanism to identify and block pirated clips, as it has done with music owned by companies with which it has struck deals. Instead, it asks television and film companies to monitor the site and point out copyright-infringing clips, at which point it is willing to take these clips down.

This state of affairs suits YouTube (and, since Google acquired YouTube for $1.65bn last year, Mr Schmidt). Viacom has to take the time and the trouble to monitor YouTube; illegal clips stay up on YouTube until Viacom serves it with a take-down notice. It is impossible to identify how many video clips on YouTube are amateur and how many are professional but its 60 per cent of the US video-sharing market clearly owes much to copyright foot-dragging.

YouTube’s defence, which will be familiar to those with teenagers, is that it can’t do much about copyright infringement and, anyway, it doesn’t have to. It says that automatic filtering of videos is very hard to do; it is now testing a system with companies including Walt Disney but does not know when it will be ready to launch. Meanwhile, it insists that it is not required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, or by European law, to block every breach of copyright.

I doubt whether Google is on such safe legal ground as Mr Schmidt asserts. Congress passed the relevant clauses of the DMCA to protect internet service providers and others from being held liable for breach of copyright by their users. But YouTube is not a neutral party to copyright infringement in the way that ISPs are: its business model is not merely to provide bandwidth but to encourage users to upload and share videos, many of which it knows quite well belong to other people.

As far as ethics go, it is definitely on shaky ground. If you were having a party in your house and, when your neighbour came around to complain about the noise, you said “sorry” and turned down the volume, only to allow a guest to raise it again five minutes later, you would obviously be in the wrong. The fact that you might have done enough to escape prosecution would not mean that you were behaving fairly.

Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, but it should meet higher standards. Mr Schmidt can muse about the digital future and ridicule Viacom for being run by lawyers all that he likes. The fact remains that he wants to profit from the private lives and intellectual property of others without obtaining their permission first. Never mind about not being evil, Mr Schmidt; don’t be anti-social.

john.gapper@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007