09.07.09

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Another Front Group with Microsoft Employees Joins Coalition Against Google

Posted in Courtroom, Google, Microsoft at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Summary: EPIC — like Yahoo — joins the opposition to a digital library settlement; further punishments for Yahoo! after Microsoft deal

SPEAKING for myself, while I worry about Google’s logo being put on a lot of digitised literature, I believe it helps in bringing knowledge to a lot of deprived (euphemism “underprivileged”) people. This new article echoes more or less the same point of view.

Blind people, for example, have access to a special library run by the Library of Congress that converts print books into formats readable by the visually impaired, but that library–in existence since 1931–only has 70,000 texts, said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind. If the settlement is approved in October, it will give “print-disabled” people “access to more books than we have ever had in human history,” he said.

The Microsoft lobby and its anti-Google antics are no news. The way hostility towards Google is spread has always been curious, with the likes of Preston Gralla and other Microsoft fans attacking Google in public (as “journalists”). The Microsoft-faithful Maggie Shiels (see examples in [1, 2, 3]) adds to this pressure on Google by writing about it for the BBC.

Guess who else is joining the action against Google? It’s EPIC once again, and it uses “privacy” as ammunition in a copyrights debate. There are Microsoft employees on EPIC’s board.

Warning that Google’s $125m digital library settlement with American authors and publishers provides exactly zero privacy protection for the world’s readers, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the hotly-debated Google Book Search case.

Another recent joiner in this fight against Google would be Yahoo!, which is virtually under Microsoft's thumb. Yahoo’s motion against Google is not news anymore, but this is:

An unhappy memo from Yahoo Inc. CEO Carol Bartz was published Tuesday, a day after investor Carl Icahn revealed he recently sold about 13 million shares in the company.

The Bartz memo published in Dow Jones All Things Digital blog urges employees at the Sunnyvale company (NASDAQ:YHOO) to get back to work and stop debating the merits of her recent search deal with Microsoft Corp.

In it she tells employees to “get out of the sugar low – we have work to do. Stop staring at our navels, stop arguing with each other. Stop debate, debate, debate, and let’s focus on the competition.”

As the above states, Yahoo! is now being ‘punished’ by Icahn. His little gig proxying for Microsoft (they communicated with one another throughout the acquisition battle) or pursuits for self gain are almost done. See the coverage in:

Yahoo! fell into Microsoft’s grip in vain. But then again, that was the purpose of putting cronies inside the company, was it not? See the posts below for background. █

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