Did anyone notice the missing Godzilla-head in Mozilla's logo?
Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
61–70 of 118 posts
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#62If Google was serious they'd put something on their front page. The readership of the New York Times is nothing compared to Google's traffic.
With great power comes great responsibility. If Google uses their core product for every political battle they need to engage in, it cheapens the brand. SOPA is evil, but it's not going to severely injure Google. So it's not worth cheapening their product for.
> SOPA is evil, but it's not going to severely injure Google.
Am I reading the bill in an overly alarmist way? It sounded to me like SOPA would make YouTube basically impossible to run.
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allow me to be cynical but, if SOPA passes and breaks the Internet, these software companies would gain a lot. Especially Microsoft. Remember the "good old days" of Microsoft Everything? I hope you're as fond of them as these software companies seem to be.
The paranoid security geek in me says "You know those Microsoft contributions to SAMBA lately? Could they go for a takedown order of the open source project on the allegation of copyright infringement now and make the SAMBA project fight to get their domain back?"
Is "You gave it to me!" no longer a valid defense as for why you have someone else's IP?
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with you that they need to be careful not to cheapen their brand, I'd argue that they have a history of displaying custom doodles for far less significant things. A simple "stop censorship" doodle, akin to those being displayed by a number of other websites, would go a long way without cheapening Google's brand.
"Merry Christmas" is a very different message from "Get rid of a law that will cause us to make less money".
More like "stop a bill from being passed into law which may shut down us and the rest of the internet as you know it" - do you have any idea how much labor it would take to be a search engine, video site or social networking site if you were liable for the legal status of all user-created content? Practically every site you use would go under, including the one we're on right now.
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#65Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
With great power comes great responsibility. If Google uses their core product for every political battle they need to engage in, it cheapens the brand. SOPA is evil, but it's not going to severely injure Google. So it's not worth cheapening their product for.
> SOPA is evil, but it's not going to severely injure Google. Am I reading the bill in an overly alarmist way? It sounded to me like SOPA would make YouTube basically impossible to run.
No, that's about right. It would make YouTube legally responsible for all user-created content. According to YouTube's press statistics, 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute. If you were to hire a team of people to watch all the videos and make sure they aren't copyrighted, you'd need 2,880 people working around the clock - and that's just to keep up with the NEW videos, letalone the backlog of stuff that's already there. At my state's minimum wage (~$10/hr) that's $691,200 per day in additional operating costs, or $252.5 million per year... Of course they could off-shore that to cut costs, but it'd still be ridiculous.
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know it may seem that way on the surface, but the proponents of this bill are larger than you think. The MPAA represents companies with a combined market cap of $250 billion dollars. That's small enough for us to beat, but Pfizer ($150bn market cap) and Microsoft ($220bn market cap) are also major proponents. All together, there's a LOT of muscle behind this act, lobbyists alone aren't going to cut it.
Not to sound naive here- but why does Microsoft support this if all the others don't?
Microsoft makes the vast majority of their money selling licenses. So does the entertainment industry.
For years these industries (software, music, and video) grew to massive size by exploiting cheap duplication of digital goods and control over distribution channels. Now that further advancing technology has brought duplication and distribution to the masses they are franticly trying to regain control.
The opposing tech companies sell services and advertising. Copyright infringement largely doesn't affect their bottom-line and these proposed measures will be costly for them to implement and legally difficult for them to follow.
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#68> We support the bills’ stated goals "providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign "rogue" websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting"...
Why doesn't anyone just call bullshit on the whole concept of the US extending its law to apply to the rest of the world?
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#69If Google was serious they'd put something on their front page. The readership of the New York Times is nothing compared to Google's traffic.
With great power comes great responsibility. If Google uses their core product for every political battle they need to engage in, it cheapens the brand. SOPA is evil, but it's not going to severely injure Google. So it's not worth cheapening their product for.
"Do no evil." - Google.
Seriously, though, I agree. A company should not make politics corollary to their brand name. If Google takes a stand on things by taking advantage of its vast user base, it will be disingenuous. A blog post is one thing. Plastering a message across their header on the home page is far different. Most Google messages are fairly innocuous, holiday themed graphics. There is a time and a place for political infrastructure, and it is not the same as for the corporate infrastructure. This is why SOPA is a problem in the first place - corporations and politics becoming intertwined in unproductive and abusive ways. You make a stand outside your brand, and you do it with integrity by not forcing it upon your user base. I agree with the theme that SOPA is bad, but I don't think it'd be good for Google to fight by putting it on their webpage.
Mozilla, I can see. Yahoo! I can't. Reddit, I can see. Google, again, I can't. Different kinds of traffic, different amounts, and different audiences.
Re: Internet giants place full-page anti-SOPA ad in NYT
#70Web companies should know how to write a readable text, it's pity they could just come up with something like that. This text is not coincise, it doesn't draw the attention of the reader to any specific point and it shows several other shortcomings, if the message ever comes across I am pretty sure this page won't help.
Yes, they could've come up with one or two sentences that appealed to the emotion and pushed the reader to a custom url relating to this issue. Or even an exaggerated screenshot of what could happen if the bill passes. Ah well. Rational writeups are all fine and good but not when you probably have a split second to capture the attention with an ad.
It's aimed at the committee members, not the average punter, and it is serious because an emotional non-fact-based driven approach would backfire.
The NYTimes location hints at the power they have to do more.