On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > > ravi wrote: > > If you mean Google's motto, its "Don't be evil". Perhaps we are > > misunderstanding who it is addressed to? > > for Google, doesn't "evil" refer to "those actions or thoughts which > hurt the bottom line"?
Let's get some perspective here. Google as a for-profit corporation, faces a constant conflict between its professed "do no evil" motto and its bottom line. All things considered, until now they have actually done a pretty good job of managing that conflict. They have weighed in on the side of the good guys on many issues like network neutrality, resisting Federal subpoenas etc. They have supported many free software products like Firefox, Wikipedia etc and also released their own products for free like the Chrome browser and Android. And from everything I have heard they treat their workers like royalty. Finally they support projects like Google Scholar that are enormously useful to academics, even though it makes zero money for the company. Now, a cynic would say, there is a hidden self-interest in all of this, that they support things like network neutrality only because it helps their business. I'd ask those cynics to contrast Google with its competitor Microsoft which also has the same business interests, but remains one of the greediest and most predatory corporations in the world. To some extent, all for-profit corporations are indeed "evil", but there are varying degrees of "evil". If we fail to make some distinctions, we will miss the opportunity to use the resources of some of these corporations to achieve some worthwhile shared goals. In the Google books case that Michael referred to, the digitization project would never have happened if not for Google. And it is not so clear that the libraries got a poor deal; see the official response from Google on the blog post linked to by Michael: http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2008/12/06/a-raw-deal-for-libraries ----------------------------------------snip Google spent a great deal of time with a number of our library partners to get their input throughout the settlement negotiations. The input of the libraries was extremely valuable, and the result is an agreement that offers a number of benefits to library partners, even compared to our current agreements with them. Our current agreements are actually quite simple: the libraries provide Google with books; we scan the books; we then can make use of these scans in our services; and many libraries also receive a copy of the material we scan with them. For in-copyright works, the libraries' use of these works was limited by copyright law, as was Google's. The settlement agreement opens up new opportunities for reading as it provides explicit authorization that goes above and beyond what would be allowed under fair use. The biggest benefit of the agreement is the fact that the large majority of these books will be accessible in the U.S.. -raghu. -- "Why is the man (or woman) who invests all your money called a broker?" - George Carlin _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
