Fake Bill Gates

For the longest time, Google was merely a conduit to get to everyone’s content, but Google didn’t actually jump on the hosting bandwagon itself.  But over the last few years, Google has clearly dove into the hosting business.

1. They started up Google Video, and later bought out Youtube. Amusingly, Google Video is still up.
2. A while back, people started hosting code directly on the Google Code project site.
3. Somewhere around then, they threw up Google Patents, which basically took the entire USPTO patent database, digitized the old ones (really old patents are only available as scanned images on the USPTO database), and made the search functionality subtantially better than the PTO’s.
4. Along came Google Knol, which was Google’s counter to Wikipedia.  Of course, many look at this largely as a failed project as a substantial number of articles are simply copied and pasted straight from Wikipedia.
5. Then Google jumped on the book bandwagon, started scanning a ton of books, got sued for it, settled for $125 million, and now will sell print-on-demand versions of scanned books through Google Books, some out of copyright, but many still in copyright.

Now, Google has jumped on the Image bandwagon, by striking a deal with Time Life to get over 10 million images dating back to the 1880s.  The vast majority of these images were never publicly released.

My only question is what license these images have.  Obviously, Life is aware that by putting all these up, people are going to use the images for personal reasons (like setting them as desktop backgrounds), but what about mashups and stock photo use for news articles and website design?  I figure that these are generally off limits, but there’s not even any notice of how you can use these images.

Last week, Associated Press sent DMCA takedown notices to a blog claiming “copyrights” on quotes ranging from 30 - 80 words. Someone quickly found AP’s policy which apparently demands a license for the quoted use of 5 words or more. The AP followed up with a statement that they’d meet with some bloggers to determine what copyright laws should be in regards to writing text on the internet. Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch blasted AP because of these ridiculous assertions, and AP did what old fogies running ginormous corporations always do when they have no idea how to handle technology: they made total hypocrites out of themselves by quoting 22 words from Arrington.

But now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of [TechCrunch's] posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law.

And just so you know, AP, Microsoft owns following patents:

• System and method for monetizing excerpts of media,
• System and method for claiming copyright on 5 words and up
• Apparatus combining giant douche and turd sandwich, and
• System, method, and apparatus for removing one’s head from his own asshole (I constantly have to explain to Ballmer how to use this one)

I expect royalty checks from you so I can get back up above Warren Buffet. I’ll have Ballmer send an intern to pick the checks up in person.

And even then, Microsoft has started running a combinator function taking every combination of the 6,000,000 most commonly used words in 5 word long phrases (we’ve patented the iterator for generating said phrases too). That’s only 7.776e+33 different combinations. We’ll be sending you some DMCA takedowns for all the news you post Monday.