
Google is Done Paying Silicon Valley's Legal Bills - peter123
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/11/further-thoughts-google-book-search-settlement
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sdurkin
Little story about Henry Ford. Every grade school American History textbook
mentions how Mr. Ford raised the wages of his factory workers above market
value, so they could afford to buy the cars they produced. Little known fact:
Ford was then sued by the shareholders for breach of fiduciary responsibility.
He lost.

Google is a publicly traded company. Its CEO and board are bound by law to
seek the greatest returns possible for shareholders. If they don't seek the
highest returns, they can be sued. They have decided that it is no longer in
the monetary interest of Google to subsidize legal costs for an entire
industry.

~~~
jhancock
I find it interesting that many believe a company's "CEO and board are bound
by law to seek the greatest returns possible for shareholders" is actual law.
Is it? What is this law? Companies are state entities, not federal ones. So
the only federal law would be SEC stuff, right? I find it hard to believe that
all 50 states have the same law.

IANAL, I would appreciate someone pointing me the law or court decisions that
have made this to be.

~~~
ulysses
Two relevant Wikipedia links:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors>

Summary of fiduciary duty as I understand it (IANAL):

An agent has a responsibility to act in his or her client's best interest. An
example is a trust, which is obligated to act in the financial best interests
of the beneficiary. I believe a lawyer's duty to the client and a doctor's
duty to the patient are similar. In the case of a board of directors, they
have a legal responsibility to act in the best interest of the shareholders.

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AndrewWarner
There is no incentive for Google to take cases all the way through the court
system just so they could set a precedent that helps the rest of us.

There's actually a disincentive for them to do that since precedents could
help their competition and court cases have unexpected consequences.

~~~
nebula
_There is no incentive for Google to take cases all the way through the court
system just so they could set a precedent that helps the rest of us._

The article says that the proposed settlement over book indexing is for $125M.
I have no idea if it costs that kind of money to obtain justice.

One thing made me very uncomfortable while reading the article:

the fact that one needs deep pockets to fight it out in the courts. When the
amount of money one has significantly affects the outcome of a legal fight,
what is the meaning of law? Isn't it how Microsoft gets away with pretty much
anything?

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pedalpete
I think this is more of a strategic decision. The opportunity is for google
and only google to pay to scan all the books. This increases google's value,
and competitors need to decide if it is worth it to them to spend the dough.

~~~
DLWormwood
I think that the point the EFF article was trying to make: that Google is
helping itself at the potential "expense" of others. But the EFF is an
industry-wide advocacy body, so they have a vested interest in promoting the
industry as a whole by helping to establish precedent, not just helping
individual companies.

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mattmaroon
I'm not sure that this is any shift at all in Google's policies. It's probably
that in all of these cases Google was trying to do maximize their own profits.

It probably just weighed the odds and decided, in those cases where it went to
trial, that it was better to try to win the case than pay a huge settlement
check. In the Author's Guild suit, they probably realized they had little
chance of winning and the results of a loss would be incredibly costly.

It's a mistake to assume a corporation is (or should be) trying to fight for
innovation rather than to maximize their own profit. Google may try to avoid
evil, but they're not moral crusaders either.

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peter123
don't be evil?

~~~
brentb
this isn't evil. there's a very real chance that google will lose the suit if
they take it all the way, so settling at least buys them the ability to go
forward with their book indexing project and protects them from a potentially
very large legal liability. it's not like google set out to strike an
exclusive-right-to-copy deal.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I don't understand why this is any different than web search, which has
repeatedly won in court. Can someone explain it to me?

~~~
jcl
I think part of the difference is that robots.txt was established early enough
to become a de facto standard way to opt out of automated indexing. There is
no equivalent system for print, where the convention is that everything is
fully protected by copyright by default.

Another difference is that automated indexing has become inherent to web
publishing, so much that people publish with the expection that Google will
index their pages. Book authors, on the other hand, publish with the
expectation that their works are not indexed in this fashion.

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helveticaman
$#%&.

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jorgeortiz85
This is pure linkbait.

What high-profile cases has Google won (not settled)? I can't think of any off
the top of my head.

~~~
jim-greer
Most of the cases are important in setting precedents though the plaintiffs
weren't big names like Viacom:

Perfect 10 v. Google - A porn site sued them over creating thumbnails of their
images for image search. Google won, and set an important fair use precedent.

Geico v. Google - Geico sued over Google allowing competitors to buy keywords
on Geico's trademark. Google won - this mostly affects keyword advertising.

Field v. Google - Writer sued Google for caching a page with his work. Google
won.

There are others...

