gio’s WeBlog

In a rather stunning move, Google recently purchased the popular video site YouTube The question many are asking is how Google will deal with the potential copyright violations on the site?

To show you how much the Internet has changed in a relatively short amount of time, it is important to look back at the last big public medium that had copyright issues. In this case, we are talking about Napster. As you know, Napster was a system where music could be traded by people for free. This, of course, drove the record labels and artists crazy. If people were trading the music for free, royalties and revenues were not being produced. To quell the uprising, the music industry went after Napster and even individual users, claiming that the copyright for the musical pieces was being violated. As you also know, the record companies won the fight.

Now consider YouTube. From just about any angle, YouTube appears to be the Napster of the online video industry. The obvious difference is that many people will simply upload their own videos and creations to the site. In such circumstances, it’s obvious that nobody can complain that there is a copyright violation because people have voluntarily put it up on the site. The problem that arises, however, is when people go ahead and upload videos and other matter from television, DVDs, and so on. Based on the various legal precedents set in the Napster case, it would appear that copyright claims can be made against YouTube.

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Google must be wondering what it has gotten itself into. YouTube is in trouble again after receiving a subpoena from Fox for posting episodes of the show 24.

Fox has a number of shows that are very popular with viewers. American Idol is obviously the biggest, but the Simpsons, House and 24 certainly carry their own weight. One of the big ratings winners for any television channel, including Fox, is the first new show of the season. Given this fact, you can imagine how unhappy Fox was to learn that the first episode of 24 this season was posted on YouTube before the premier was shown!

To say that Fox executives must be unhappy is a slight understatement. Talk about stealing the winds out of the channel’s sails! One of the biggest nights for the show was pre-empted! Well, Fox isn’t taking the situation laying down.

On January 18th, Fox petitioned a California court one the matter. The court issued a subpoena to YouTube to find out who the posting part is. The subpoena is based on a claim of a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At this time, neither YouTube nor Google has indicated what steps they will take in response.

At this point, it is unclear whether Fox will actually sue YouTube for allowing the posting. Traditionally, YouTube has reacted to such complaints by removing the offending content. In this case, however, the horse is already out of the barn. The posting arguably spoiled the premier of the show, a big money maker for Fox.

Further confusing the situation is the presence of Google. Google has a history of fighting such subpoenas. It will be interesting to see if it imposes this theory on YouTube. Doing so would seem dubious since it would probably result in Fox bring a claim.

Ultimately, this situation simply portends further problems down the line for YouTube and Google. As these postings happen more and more, one can expect the artists and entertainment companies to eventually react as they did with the file sharing music situation. When will it happen? Who knows, but it should shake up the copyright field in a big way.

Richard A. Chapo is with SanDiegoBusinessLawFirm.com - incorporate in California.

Google Inc. has launched a new software package that allows you to see satellite images on your desktop.

Google Earth lets you search for locations anywhere on earth and display 3D aerial images of major cities and tourist attractions. Google Earth is in development, but a free beta version is available for home users. Locations can be searched by address, intersections, cities, zip codes or countries and the images can be zoomed in close enough to see streets and buildings.

The images generated are 3D – you can rotate the view to see different sides of an object. You can navigate using a mouse or the keyboard, and view selectable layers to display information about local features such as roads, terrain, schools or golf courses.

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Click on the images below and find out.

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I just noticed myspace.com now showing the “powered by Google” logo. This comes as no surprise to me as the two company already made a deal just a few months ago. It was actually a $900M advertising deal with myspace. Myspace now uses Google’s search engine along with the contextual advertisements that Google is serving.

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Google has reached its all-time high stock price today November 21, 2006 7:59PM ET finally surpassing the $500 mark. Google now has a market value of about $154 billion just eight years after Sergey Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page. Wow! 

I got this news from CNNMoney.com: Google jumps past $500

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This is yet another milestone in making the web more simpler and better. Yesterday, in a collaborative effort to help webmasters, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft agreed to use a standard Sitemaps protocol to index sites.  It's called the Sitemap 0.90 which is offered under a Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

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I made an experiment 5 days ago which I called SEO Experiment 1.0. The purpose of that experiment was to get to the first page of Google search for the keyword "seo experiment".

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I call this as my first SEO experiment. What's the deal? The object of the experiment is to get to the first page of Google SERP using the keyword "seo experiment" (without the quotation marks). Google currently shows a total of 2,380,000 search results as i write this post. Not bad. If this experiment succeeds then maybe I can do more seo experiments in the future like ranking well for the keyword "seo".

It looks like Google is catching up with Yahoo!'s Flickr and has come up with a fairly simple way to improve image search results through image labeling. Google recently launched Google Image Labeler, an image labeling game which is based on ESP Game by Luis von Ahn, that picks two random players who will label or tag an image. The idea is for both players to input as many labels as possible describing a given image pulled from the web. If you see a picture of a bird and both label it as bird, the next image will be shown automatically and you can continue until your time has run out. Players can earn points with every matched labels. I just dont know what those earned points for though. If you're not doing anything, you might want to play the game for a while and help google improve its image search result which in turn will help searchers like us.

Google has always been known for its simple minimalistic home page which I think sets them apart from the other search engines(especially the major ones) and earlier today i noticed that they made a little tweak. I was checking the SERP result for the keyword "isulong seoph" when i noticed the new Video link from Google's home page. It seems that Google removed or should i say moved the link to Froogle, Google's shopping search engine, and replaced it with a link to Google Video. This is probably related to YouTube's growing popularity with videos on the Internet market. John Battelle, a well-known search blogger and author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, said on Yahoo! News:

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Did you notice your PageRank earlier today(July 14)? Well, check it out. Yes, it looks like Google has updated their PageRank! After a month and 11 days since this contest started I got a rank of 4. Not bad. I don't know how you feel about this but seeing your PageRank Toolbar filled with some "green" color in it is something and it really feels great! I mean this is what SEO is all about.

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While looking at Google's cache of my site i noticed the keyword "seoph" on my heading is not highlighted. It seems to me that Google cannot read it the way it should be read as "seoph". Its probably because of the color formatting i made. What do you think?