Google Fiber’s reported struggles cause AT&T to take a victory lap.
Source: AT&T lectures Google Fiber about challenges of broadband investment | Ars Technica
Google Fiber’s reported struggles cause AT&T to take a victory lap.
Source: AT&T lectures Google Fiber about challenges of broadband investment | Ars Technica
In what appears to be a retaliatory move against DMCA notice archive Lumen Database, anti-piracy outfit Remove Your Media has launched a transparency report of its own. The report lists people who have sent the company DMCA counter-notices but it goes much further than Lumen by publishing their names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
Source: Anti-Piracy Group Reveals Personal Details of Counter-Notice Senders – TorrentFreak
In the last two weeks we’ve received two notices of violations from AdSense, each of which seems more ridiculous than the other in some way, and which has us reconsidering our use of AdSense as a media property, as Google fails at distinguishing between reporting on bad things and celebrating those same things. In both cases, the “violation” involved a post that was many years old, so it’s unclear why Google suddenly discovered them. In both cases, the posts were basic reporting on something that had happened, and no rational and reasonable person would conclude they violated any policy that AdSense has. And, yet, in both cases, Google claimed they violated its policies, and threatened that if we were unable to sort through the 64,000 other posts on Techdirt to weed out the ones that somehow violate Googles bizarre and arbitrary morality police policies, we risk losing our account.
No tweets, no YouTube, no likes, no killings, court told
It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but one anti-piracy outfit is targeting everything that comes into its path. Over the past week Copyright UNIVERSAL has tried to censor legitimate content from Netflix, Amazon, Apple, various ISPs, movie theaters, news outlets and even sporting leagues.
Source: Anti-Piracy Group Wants to Take Down ‘The Internet’ – TorrentFreak
And while this is generally an idea that would benefit all broadband providers, it would benefit new providers like Google Fiber the most. That’s why companies like AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have been blocking this pole-attachment reform, in some cases trying to claim such policies violate their Constitutional rights. The ISPs figure that if they can’t block Google Fiber from coming to town, their lawyers can at least slow Google Fiber’s progress while they try to lock customers down in long-term contracts.
Source: ISPs Are Blocking Google Fiber’s Access To Utility Poles In California | Techdirt
Here’s the stupidest thing on piracy you’re going to read today. Or this month. Maybe even this whole holiday season. Rudy Shur, of Square One Publishers, has a problem with piracy, which he thinks is actually a problem with Google.
After being contacted by Google Play with an offer to join the team, Shur took it upon himself to fire off an angry email in response. That would have been fine, but he somehow convinced Publisher’s Weekly to print both the letter and some additional commentary. Presumably, his position at a publishing house outweighed Publisher Weekly’s better judgment, because everything about his email/commentary is not just wrong, but breathtakingly so.
Last week we wrote about receiving our very first Right To Be Forgotten notice from Google, disappearing an earlier post that talked about articles in the NY Times that had been disappeared thanks to other RTBF requests. Yes, someone used a RTBF request to remove our article about the RTBF which was referencing other articles that someone had removed via a RTBF request.
And… yesterday we received a notification that this new article was also chucked down the memory hole thanks to a RTBF request, so that anyone who searches on a particular name in Europe will no longer see that article either. At this point, it’s fairly clear that it’s Thomas Goolnik who is making all of these RTBF requests, as he’s the only individual named. We don’t think either of our articles should be removed even under the EU’s laws that allow for a RTBF, because those laws only apply to out of date/irrelevant information, and the fact that Goolnik has just now made a RTBF request in an attempt to censor us and to edit his own Google results is not obsolete information and is entirely relevant and newsworthy.
Google faces fines if it does not comply with ridiculous recursion.
Source: Google ordered to remove links to stories about Google removing links to stories
A recording of Kim Dotcom and several Universal Music executives captured two days before the Megaupload raids has revealed the label planning to do a deal with the entrepreneur. Amid discussion of ‘taxing’ Google by diverting its ad revenue to the label, the execs offered to downgrade Dotcom from “evil” to “neutral” in return for dropping legal action over the “Mega Song”.
Source: Universal Music and Kim Dotcom Prepared a Deal to Tax Google – TorrentFreak