I started thinking about all the hot water Google got into with regards to the launching their different services, such as Google Street View, Google Books, and Google News. Google worked on each project, appropriated content that may or may not have been theirs to take, and then released the project, only to receive responses, “Hey, you didn’t ask me first if you could take that.”
If Google first asked permission, nothing would actually get done. Just think of the simple process you run into where you send out a question to five people via email and you say, “Hey, could I get your response to this?” And then they don’t respond. So then you have to follow up again with them, this time pushing them, “Hey, I really need your response on this.” With all your pushing, you get four people to respond, but there’s always that one person that doesn’t respond and you have to call them. And when you finally get them on the phone you get some excuse, “I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to you, I’ve been really busy. Sure, I can give you a response.” And then in less than 15 seconds, he gives you the answer.
That’s just a story with five people. Imagine thousands or even millions. It’s simply not possible. So the answer Google goes with, “Let’s just do our next project, take the content we want, and let them complain about it afterwards” or more appropriately, “Let’s just do it, everyone will see the enormous value that they won’t care that we didn’t ask for permission first, and for those who do care, we can remove things after the fact.”
It’s a lot easier to operate like Google and like many other similar companies. Simply take the content without permission, and wait until you receive that cease and desist order. If you deal with the consequences after the fact, it’s an unknown quantity that may or may not be costly. The alternative method, ask permission first, is a well known and expensive option.
Is this the new model of publishing and content online? Just go ahead and do it and deal with the fallout afterwards? Look at Napster. That’s how they built their model. Sure it was a completely illegal platform, but they built a brand on it and people wanted that brand.
Google didn’t ask permission to search your site, but why would they?
Not many people realize this but Google Search operates under the same “do first, deal with consequences later” principle. Google indexes your site and the entire web and they do it all without first asking our permission. If you want, you can set up a robots.txt file to alert Google’s web spiders to pass over your site. Very few people know about this, nor do they employ it, because who wants to be invisible to Google? It would be like wanting to take your company’s name out of the phone book.
That’s kind of a dated analogy (“be like taking your name out of the phone book”) since almost nobody uses a phonebook anymore to find phone numbers. We all rely on Google. So go ahead phone company, take my name out of your book, but Google, please keep me in.
David, interesting concept – thank you for addressing it.
How is what Google is doing different than what a photojournalist has been doing for years for the NYT, AP, etc. when they shoot editorial photography for a story? They don’t ask for your permission when capturing that “content” to tell a story. It’s presumed that what’s out in a public domain (in the case of the photographer, anything in what’s designated as “public” space) is fair game, accounting for few exceptions. And those photos help sell stories. In the case of Google, they have access to what’s in the ether of the entire Web. Unlike Napster whose model circumvented an expectation of payment (for music), it seems as if Google had no such obstacle of perception around permission or compensation to explicitly overcome. Rather ingenious business model.
Carla
@carlainsf