The irony is probably not lost on the French movie company, Flach Film. Its movie, “The World according to Bush” takes a, how can we put it, a less than flattering take on the Bush family. Linking granddad Bush, Prescott, to the corporate sphere of Nazi Germany, and George senior to funding Saddam Hussein in the early days of his regime. And yet Google, the company that professes to “do no evil” is being sued by the French firm for breach of copyright.
The action has been picked by the US press, and in the process a film that barely raised a flicker to begin with, is gaining mass media exposure.
The trouble for the Californian company is this. It is possible to view a pirated version of the film from links provided by Google Video France, and apparently 43,000 hits have been notched up to date.
Reuters quoted Jean-Francois Lepetit, producer of the film, as saying: “We made estimates of the prejudice, and it goes well beyond 500,000 euros. The film has been downloaded about 50,000 times, and it has certainly been copied afterwards.” Flach claims that Google has not merely “acted as a simple host but as a fully responsible publisher.”
It seems that as the search engine company impacts upon media across the globe, the law courts are becoming the main method for fighting its otherwise irresistible momentum.
Google News is coming under pressure from the French Press Agency complaining about the use of headlines and photographs, and from the Belgium press, who have forced the removal of French and German language newspapers based in Belgium. In Denmark the press demanded a system that would enable them to opt into the planned Google News Denmark service, forcing the company to delay launch.
Yet we haven’t even begun on YouTube.
Google has its fingers in many pies. And some subsidiaries such as YouTube fly close to the copyright wind, but perhaps the fundamental problem for at least one venture is this. Google News strips out the branding and customer loyalty, and instead of a newspaper editor choosing the articles you read, and putting them in a certain order, the user can pick and mix, as if in a sweet shop.
The product is empowering for the consumer, but a blow for the publisher, since it reduces barriers to entry and provides a kind of level playing field in which articles compete on merit.
In the UK and US though, Google has not led to a deterioration in the quality of editorial, rather it has led to unprecedented richness. It does feel as if some publishers don’t like Google News, because they don’t like competition. The public’s interest does not lie with antiquated views and controls, but rather with an open market in which the consumer is the true king.
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