Google IS Evil
I think it's becoming pretty obvious to a lot of people that Google has very quietly - and subtly - stepped over that line and become evil.
Most large companies are viewed that way of course. How many journalists can mention Microsoft without adding "the Evil Empire" or similar derogatory phrase?
But Google went out of it's way to tell us right from the beginning that Google would Do No Evil.
From their web site:
"You can make money without doing evil"
Yeah, well folks, I don't believe you can make billions without upsetting some people. Unfortunately, Google have sneaked a lot past people, especially non-technical people, because their brand is now viewed as "Good".
http://www.google-watch.org/ has always been there, shouting from the rooftops that something is amiss. But it's easy to dismiss the messenger if they are so totally obsessed with dissing someone else.
These are all infamous articles about Google:
But this weeks article Just Google 'thou shalt not steal' (via Mike Gunderloy) offers an authors perspective of the Google Library project. I've heard a lot of authors mention this, and frankly I'm not sure how Google can seriously argue their position.
I just tried a book search for the first time. I signed in with my gmail account (never used, just reserved my name) and was able to view all the pages that I wanted to out of a random book I found.
Occasionally it would tell me that I couldn't view the next page "to protect the copyright of the author" but it then allowed me to go back to the page index and choose the next page anyway.
So, from my layman's point of view Google has allowed me to view any entire book still under copyright. It didn't cost me a dime.
If I was an author I'd be "a little annoyed".
No wonder Mike says "As an ex-book author whose livelihood in that area was pretty well destroyed by the Internet I must say I'm sympathetic"