June 13th, 2008 by Fiana de Guzman
After reading an interesting blog on valleywag.com, I started thinking about, how Google manages to offer such a great amount of information about almost anything, with just one click. Obviously, the company has to have ways to somehow work itself around privacy privileges, confidentiality agreements and the like. Google’s lawyers usually busy themselves trying to defend their right to keep content online — so Google’s search engine can index it, of course. Currently, however, it seems they are busy trying to get – and preferably keep – their own name out of the ‘search results’ when it comes to the YouTube revenue-sharing program – the video site’s new program for ads sold by video creators.
Stacey Wexler, litigation counsel for Google, instantly reacted to a blog on Silicon Alley Insider that posted the entire advertising contract. Via email, she asked Silicon Alley Insider to take down the references to this particular contract. Wexler claims the contract is confidential. First, the email was posted to its site, but now displays an error where Wexler’s email once appeared. The original post about YouTube, however, remains online, and a reader has even reposted Wexler’s email in a comment. This comment has recently been deleted from the site. Fortunately, valleywag.com has posted the email and the contract on its site. As a result, a discussion about why Google’s made such a big fuss, legal matters and an ‘evil rank’ has started:
A contract cannot be considered binding on people who didn’t sign it in the first place, so the actual CONTENTS of the contract are irrelevant.
How apt coming from a company that espouses to organize and spread “information”. Google made such a big fuss that they be free to flout copyright laws and be able to scan and publish electronic copies of all the books in the world. And then here they are, whining when one contract gets published on the net. Its not surprising though – this has always been Google’s modus operandi. It’s only evil when someone else does it.
On this note: Google might be the world’s biggest and most used search engine, but this rather embarrassing incident clearly shows that there is still a lot to learn.
