An ethical Google
Impossible.
It's hard enough to make ordinary companies be legal, never mind ethical. Trans-National ones just make sure they don't get caught.
Making Google a good corporate citizen and pay creators fairly won’t break the internet, a leaked impact study on copyright suggests. The 200 page impact assessment (IA), leaked to Statewatch, addresses the thorny issue of content sharing platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. “Some online service providers refuse …
.... Google is in the ads business. They make advertisement. That's a service copyright holders should pay for. However Google is so nice as provide it for free. If a copyright holder doesn't want to use that service, he can just create a little text file calls robots.txt and let Google know that they do not want that free promotion.
So, just walk to a newspaper, ask them to publish an ad for you - full-sized front page - and then demand to be paid for the privilege that they can run your ad. I'm pretty sure you get laughed at.
Instead that Google laughs at the copyright holder, they do what the newspaper would never do - run your ad for free.
* Ethical? Don't make me laugh. The internet is the lawless wild wild west frontier of no regulation. Google 'Surveillance Capitalism' on the Guardian, then read the Harvard paper.. Its sobering!
* Wonder what kind of 'privacy-shield' Google has for protecting senior executive families. Especially the more vulnerable like parents / kids etc. We know Zuk covers the mic / webcam.
* Does Google suck up all its family's info, or is there a special Tor / VPN like filter, that protects the chosen few?
* Maybe its simpler, perhaps, the inner circle just type a short code into every search and the system magically ignores any trace. (Auto-filled Toolbar Search)
...can we bake into it some words that will compel the rights collection agencies how much they actually pay the label, and how much of that goes to the artist(s) that we're all listening to?
I wonder of the labels will support such a new law because they're greedy and want money, or if they'll lobby like hell so they don't have to disclose the pittance they pay to the artists that aren't act headliners.
Same old, same old.
"The labels don't pay the artists enough, so its OK for Google to pay them nothing at all. "
When I was an idealistic young semi hippy I didn't think much could be worse than the record labels system. Boy, was I ever wrong...
"The labels don't pay the artists enough, so its OK for Google to pay them nothing at all. "
That's neither what I said nor what I was implying.
Let me make it simple for you: if Google should be more honest, then a little bit of honesty from the labels would also be appreciated. Clear enough?
The words we need to bake into the copyright law are "These, enumerated, acts are the ones you're allowed to restrict. Everything else is none of your goddamn business, and any attempt by you to limit it in any way whatsoever, whether legally or technically, will result in your work losing whatever legal protection it might otherwise be entitled to claim".
So for instance, you can sell a copy of a work, and you can prevent making or reselling unlicensed copies of that work. But if you try to, e.g., prevent the owner from playing it when he buys a new computer, or prevent him from playing it on a particular type of device, or because the playing device was purchased in a different country from the medium - bzzt, you're out, your work can now be hacked freely and serve you right if it ends up on a torrent.
Because copyright law doesn't give you the right to limit any of those things.
"Making Google a good corporate citizen and pay creators fairly won’t break the internet."
Who ever imagined that it might? Switching Google off wouldn't break the Internet. Switching Facebook off wouldn't break the Internet. It's hard to know what goes on in people's minds sometimes.