Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass

Re:Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass by scotty79 on Saturday October 10, 2009 @07:51PM (#874047)

Guy is whining that Google dared to clear up some of the mess of book copyright that was hurting human knowledge preservation and dissemination. He thinks that since Google is rich and can spend money on what they want then whatever they achieve is cheating. He perceives that any endeavor Google decides to spend their money on indicates a precious market that they want to monopolize. He somehow not manages to take into account that before Google took its shot it was a messy desert.

To paraphrase Nancy Kress, question is not who should be the repository of such public trust as knowledge. Question is who can be. And it seems that Google is first to stand up to this task.

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Re:Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass by kiba on Saturday October 10, 2009 @07:55PM (#874051)

What if a company gained a monopoly through pure goodness?

Do people have the right to persecute them for simply being a "potential" threat even though they did nothing wrong?

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Re:Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass by chengas123 on Saturday October 10, 2009 @08:06PM (#874062)

I think it depends upon what that company does with their monopoly. E.g. Microsoft basically has a monopoly in the OS market, which was fine until they unfairly used that advantage to put Netscape out of business. Now they are in trouble with the EU, etc.

But I don't believe this would create a monopoly. My understanding is that the settlement does not stop any other company from going out and scanning the same books. In fact, due to the settlement, I believe it would be far easier for a second company to embark upon the same endeavor since Google will be setting a precedent for many of the legal issues involved. Without the settlement, no one would have access to these books because in many cases it is impossible to track down the rights holders. All in all, I think this settlement does a lot of good for the public.

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Re:Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass by kiba on Saturday October 10, 2009 @08:14PM (#874071)

Netscape was actually killed by apache. Netscape doesn't make its money in the browser market, but actually in the server market.

Note, this is from heard-so. So it might be false. Nonetheless, it is an intruging idea that open source competitors are actually silent killers of proprietary software companies. Kinda make you wants to examine history to see who is really the true players and the true good guys and bad guys of civilization.

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Re:Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass by Zaak on Saturday October 10, 2009 @08:53PM (#874123)

Netscape started out selling its browser. People bought it because it was significantly better than the free alternative at the time (Mosaic). Then Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer, which was good enough to challenge Navigator, and was distributed for free.

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Re:Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass by kiba on Saturday October 10, 2009 @09:09PM (#874145)

I am not actually suggesting that microsoft didn't beat netscape in the browser market but that the apache project is the competitor that finally killed off netscape's last supply of oxygen. Think of apache as the one to deliever the finishing blow.

What's the vote-down for, anyway?

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Re:Sergey Brin Blows Smoke Up Your Ass by gruseom on Saturday October 10, 2009 @08:05PM (#874059)

First, if an organization acquires a "monopoly" because they were the only ones to believe in, invest money in, and actually do a grand thing that others called impossible -- a thing of great benefit to humanity -- there is something wrong with people who want to kneecap them for that.

Second, let's have some evidence that Google, in this case, is doing anything abusive at all. From what I've seen so far, their actions have all been directed towards trying to make more books accessible. If that's true, it's perverse to accuse them of being the ones going against the public interest.

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