Did You Know That Today is “F**k Google Day” in the Music Community?
I had no idea. From CMU:
So welcome to Fuck Google Day, a popular event in the music community, not as big as the Grammys Weekend, but up there with Record Store Day.
It’s Google itself that has instigated these glamorous proceedings with the publication of its latest ‘How Google Fights Piracy’ report, in which the web giant brags about all the things it does across its various services to stop those evil pirates from fucking everything up by pirating pirated content through the employment of pirate-like piracy tactics on the big bad piracy networks.
But just in case someone – somewhere – isn’t convinced by all that, the Google report also bigs up all the cash the web firm has been paying over to content makers, and especially music types. I mean, as well as that much touted $3 billion it’s paid over to the music industry, do you know that YouTube’s content management platform Content ID has resulted in $2 million of ad loot being paid over to rights owners from user-generated content? Did you know that?
Of course, the music industry has big problems with Google search, principally the fact the web firm refuses to do blanket de-listings of websites that have been deemed to be rampant copyright infringers by the courts, which then requires rights owners to submit a constant flood of takedown requests against websites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents.
But it’s anything YouTube-related that really riles the music industry these days, with labels, publishers, artists, songwriters, managers and collecting societies all currently embroiled in that big battle with the Google video site over the royalties it pays – or rather the minimum guarantees it doesn’t pay – and the copyright loophole it employs to allow users to upload videos containing other people’s music.
Officially kick-starting the Fuck Google Day proceedings with a speedy overview of Google’s new ‘Look At Us, We’re Fab’ report, the boss of UK record industry trade group BPI, Geoff Taylor, told reporters: “This report looks a lot like ‘greenwash’. Although we welcome the measures Google has taken so far, it is still one of the key enablers of piracy on the planet”.
