Okay, I'm pissed off. Google's plan to fuck copyright in the ass with the biggest steel-barbed dildo they can find is way out of bounds.
Internet piracy is bad enough without having an search engine that has become a verb blatantly steal everything in print. The fucking jerks.
I confess to having a copy of the Real Book (not the incorrect 'legal' version, a real, underground copy I bought over 20 years ago). And copied CDs, I have lots of them, though I have a rule about it: self-produced and/or local acts, I won't bootleg. Warner Bros. and their ilk, they have renegged on the promise of CDs. Over 20 years ago they promised that if we accepted inferior sound quality, we could have our records smaller and CHEAPER. A mass market CD should not have a retail price over $5, and that's allowing for wholesalers who are largely not necessary in the day of the internet.
A guy who puts his own ass on the line for a CD, I'll buy it at $15, but Warner Brothers? Fuck them, if I rip a copy it's their fault for charging 3x+ the fair market price.
Still, I believe in intellectual property. If I burn a copy of a CD, it's not to screw the musicians, it's to screw the greedy RIAA fuckers. If the musician gets meaningful money, I won't pirate it. I've even refused gifts of pirated albums on this basis.
What's Google trying to do? They are trying to make eveyr living author work for free. Fuck them. Don DeLillo never asked me to work for free, so damned if I'm going to support Google's efforts to deprive him of royalties he's earned ten times over.
Jonathan Lethem
Michael Chabon
Toni Morrison
Elmore Leonard
Amy Hempel
Lionel Shriver
Barry Hannah
Chuck Palahniuk
Joey Goebel
Jim Cracy
Jeffrey Eugenides
Thomas Pynchon
and so on.
What do they have in common? They never asked me to work for free. So why should I steal their work? I liked google, but they've fucked the dog here. Big time. I might even go to the trouble of taking the 'Google search' bar off my unvisited web site. I'll be using other search engines until I have evidence that Google isn't the biggest bunch of asshoes in the search engine business.
2 comments:
I cant see how this is in *any* way legal…Harlan Ellison recently went to battle with AOL and won, or moreso “settled”. Needless to say it drained him financially (where he was even soliciting people to help pay, although he says he will pay everyone back, and is apparently doing so now)…
http://harlanellison.com/KICK/
I agree with you on copyright: I’m not really too bloody concerned that, say, Charles Dickens “estate” gets any damn money: they can go get fucking jobs. Same with Cole Porter or Miles Davis (if a wife is still alive, ok…but mere offspring? Just cuz you carry the genes don’t mean shit).
I _have_ burned some CDs of Peoples Living, but only at times if I know this person (the recipient) would never buy the CD anyway. Or better yet (time permitting), I’ll make a sampler CD, and I _know_ such an illegal thing has actually generated some ‘oh, this is cool, I’ll look further into this artist’ sales for the likes of Tori Amos, Keith Jarrett, etc.
I can’t see this Google thing being suck-cessful. The Big Guns (Anne Rice, S. King, JK Rolling) can afford to go up against Google, and I’m sure their publishers will.
This was very informative. I didn't know Google had any such plans. Maybe Metalica can sort this out too?
:-)
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