Google, pure evil

[Ranchu]

Why are artists disappearing from the Internet?

"[...]

The press is abuzz with reports of Google’s recently revealed extortionate tactics against indie labels and artists. Rumors are that those who don’t accept YouTube’s take-it-or-leave-it licensing deal for its new streaming service will be barred from offering their own channels on YouTube and prevented from using tools like Content ID to identify their music when it is posted by others without authorization. This means not only that authorized versions of such indie artists’ work will vanish from YouTube, but that infringing copies, against which Google will still sell advertising, will stay up.

Not so long ago, Google changed its image search interface so that full-size, high-resolution images – rather than low-resolution thumbnails – appear in a slideshow-like format. Google search results now omit specific references to the site where the photographer’s work appears, and instead enable users to page through the full size gallery of images in search results without navigating to the source websites. This switch has resulted in traffic declines of close to 80 percent to photography-rich websites and squanders the investment made by site owners in applying SEO practices to the photographs they license or produce. Google’s response to photographers and site owners in the U.S.? “If you don’t like it, mark your site not to be searched.” Put another way – “the only way to stop us is to remove yourself from the Internet.”

[...]

It should give us all reason to pause when companies known for evangelizing the benefits of making creative work available on the Internet and through new technology platforms instead use their market power to make the work of indie artists and creators inaccessible, except through infringing means."

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-b...hy-are-artists-disappearing-from-the-internet

 

[Brian Legge]

...can you set this up on a per directory basis? Disallow the search engine from hitting image directories, allow it to hit the html directories?

It seems like that would allow search indexing without image display.

 

[thegman]

I think hyperbole like calling a company 'pure evil' because they have practices you don't like turns more people off real issues than it does rally them around a cause.

Requesting to not be indexed by Google is not the same as being 'taken off the Internet', it's saying you don't want to be listed by Google's search engine, i.e. decline the service of a company because you don't like the terms. As Google has a monopoly (effectively, in most Western countries), that's obviously undesirable for a lot of people.

There are a few ways to prevent resource leeching if you want to, not sure how Google's system works, but I'd imagine providing small images to them, and large images to users on your site will be reasonably straightforward.

 

[Ranchu]

Whether people are turned off means really nothing to me. This is not a rally or a cause. Evil is as evil does, and Google does it.

 

[Tejasican]

Brian,
A robots.txt file at the root directory will do it for now, but even that is an honor system type of thing. Google respects it for now....
Lawrence

 

[nongfuspring]

Google is evil for a lot of reasons not stated here, but I don't really have an issue with the full resolution image search - it's still as easy as ever to visit the source page, and we've always been able to see full resolution images without visiting it's website context.

The youtube thing is pretty dreadful though.

It seems more and more services are working against the ideal of net neutrality, or actively working against it.

 

[thegman]

Whether people are turned off means really nothing to me. This is not a rally or a cause. Evil is as evil does, and Google does it.

Not a fan of Google's work, but 'evil' seems excessive.

 

[Ranchu]

Google is evil for a lot of reasons not stated here, but I don't really have an issue with the full resolution image search - it's still as easy as ever to visit the source page, and we've always been able to see full resolution images without visiting it's website context.

The youtube thing is pretty dreadful though.

It seems more and more services are working against the ideal of net neutrality, or actively working against it.

Some sites traffic dropped 80% though, Google is simply stealing their content and traffic. How else to say it?

 

[Ranchu]

Not a fan of Google's work, but 'evil' seems excessive.

I don't think it's excessive at all, but I'm also alluding to this.

"Do the right thing: don't be evil. Honesty and Integrity in all we do. Our business practices are beyond reproach. We make money by doing good things."

Buchheit, the creator of gmal, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out", adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."
[FONT=verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif][/FONT]

 

[thegman]

Quite, I think Google's ideas of 'evil' are more about catchy taglines than a realistic definition of the word. But I guess we're into semantics now.

If we're going with Google's definition, then I expect we can agree.

I don't think it's excessive at all, but I'm also alluding to this.

"Do the right thing: don't be evil. Honesty and Integrity in all we do. Our business practices are beyond reproach. We make money by doing good things."

Buchheit, the creator of gmal, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out", adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."
[FONT=verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif][/FONT]

 

[nongfuspring]

Some sites traffic dropped 80% though, Google is simply stealing their content and traffic. How else to say it?

The article says nothing about which websites, what the sample size was, over what duration, or anything other than a percentage next to a generalisation coupled with an assumption.

The use of full size images via URLs is part of how the internet is structured, for example we do it on the forum all the time. Main issue is having permission and crediting the source, which google does.

 

[Ranchu]

Nonsense and obfuscation, nothing to see here huh?

 

[Steve M.]

Fastmail for my email, Photobucket for web posting, bing and others for google. Glad to be gone from those folks.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

What the F...riday. 😱

 

[semilog]

Requesting to not be indexed by Google is not the same as being 'taken off the Internet', it's saying you don't want to be listed by Google's search engine, i.e. decline the service of a company because you don't like the terms.

that is true in the a limited and technical sense. But in an operational sense, it's unmitigated BS.

Google is the de facto public index of the web -- the white and yellow pages of the internet. They have near monopoly control of that resource, and the consequences of Google's gaming or abusing that status should concern anyone who uses the web.

At a minimum, you might ask yourself whether you think that the use of YOUR images by a commercial entity should be allowed by default, with minimal or no attribution, in a manner that forces YOU to opt-out to stop their appropriation of your images from occurring. Failing to do that is a far cry from "agreeing" to Google's "terms."

 

[semilog]

Fastmail for my email, Photobucket for web posting, bing and others for google. Glad to be gone from those folks.

I've been using Fastmail for something like seven years. They're absolutely superb. Can't recommend them too highly.

Of course, about half of the email I send is to and from Gmail accounts, so Google still gets to scan about half of my ingoing and outgoing email, and exploit the information so gained for commercial purposes.

 

[Scrambler]

Must be showing my age, but I can recall searching the interweb before Google. I had Altavista searches down to a fine art, then Google turned up. With reduced traffic, Altavista ceased to function effectively and I and others had to give it up for the inferior (IMHO) Google. As at last year, Altavista ceased to exist as a name. It had ceased to exist as an approach to searching the web 10 years earlier. Like a REAL search engine, Altavista would do a proper Boolean search.

If people take their sites out of Google indexing then eventually other search engines will gain popularity as they will have access to things that Google doesn't.

That said, it's anticompetitive behaviour (antitrust in the US) I would have thought, within the arena of image display.

I wonder what SEO looks like if you want Google to stay away?

 

[pakeha]

Why are artists disappearing from the Internet?




It should give us all reason to pause when companies known for evangelizing the benefits of making creative work available on the Internet and through new technology platforms instead use their market power to make the work of indie artists and creators inaccessible, except through infringing means."

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-b...hy-are-artists-disappearing-from-the-internet

It should give us all reason to pause when companies do not pay their fair share of tax in the countries they operate - but hey, don`t sweat the big stuff🙄

 

[Ranchu]

I consider this big stuff. Truly unfortunate I left yours out.

🙄

 

[Hosermage]

About the youtube thing... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140619/17465027631/that-story-youve-read-about-youtube-blocking-indie-artists-yeah-thats-not-accurate.shtml