Crazy Corporate Control

From a BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow on how Google has gone crazy:

My latest Guardian column, "Google's YouTube policy for Android users is copyright extremism," examines the theory of copyright behind Google's announcement that it would bar people who unlocked their phones from using the new YouTube video store. This is the latest example of a new kind of copyright emerging in the 21st century, "configuration-right," in which someone who makes a creative work gets a veto over how all the devices that can play or display that work must be configured. It's a novel -- and dangerous -- proposition, akin to record companies telling which furniture you were allowed to move into the same room as your stereo, and to require that you close your window when the record was playing, lest your neighbors get some tunes for free.

Something has got to be done to keep "intellectual property" owners from sucking the air out of the sky and burying us under a blizzard of legal writ. It is crazy. They think they own everything. I'm waiting for somebody to press charges based on "owning" a time clock's seconds and demand that we all give back every second of our life or face charges of "theft". Nutty!

If you read the Doctorow article in the UK's Guardian, you find a jewel such as this:

Viacom is presently appealing a judgment against it in its infamous legal bid to shut down the service. Documents revealed during the previous court proceedings featured Viacom executives vigorously and profanely debating which one of them would get to run YouTube once they'd sued it into oblivion. This potent mixture of fear and lust for YouTube is why Viacom was paying multiple ad agencies to sneak video clips on to YouTube even as it was suing it, even going so far as to "rough up" the video before posting it so that it appeared to come from dodgy pirate sites – presumably, posting studio-fresh clips would have given the game away.

The greed is absurd. One capitalist screaming about the "theft" of another even while it is "roughing up" its own videos and slipping them onto the other's site to get the benefit of "buzz" while claiming that this kind of IP "theft" was harming it! The audacity! The sheer lying deceit of greed without limits!

This comment that ends Doctorow's article is telling. This is the corruption that comes with great money:

Google looked as if it had lain down with the dogs and woken up with fleas. Now it's back in the kennel, having learned nothing. It's come a long way from its early days, when it refused to compete with other search engines by running banners or accepting paid placement – when Google's policy was "don't be evil" and "don't suck".

Google is like those idealistic youth who enter politics to "make a difference" and push out the corrupt older generation. But along they way to getting the reins of power they make the little compromises, then the bigger compromises, and end up being the new "corrupt older generation".