Google contro Youtube-mp3.org: la replica di ‘Philip’

fonte: La Stampa

“Philip”, il titolare di YouTube-Mp3.org, si ribella. Dopo aver tentato invano di contattare i legali di Google per discutere del problema, dopo aver ricevuto l'ingiunzione, ha deciso di scrivere a sua volta una lettera aperta, pubblicata sul proprio sito, difendendo le proprie ragioni e accusando l'azienda di Mountain View di usare due pesi e due misure: il copyright non è un problema – è il ragionamento di Philip - quando si tratta di setacciare testate online di tutto il mondo per ricavare materiale con cui foraggiare Google News, oppure quando si vuole scansire milioni di libri da aggiungere al catalogo di Google Books, perché allora lo dovrebbe diventare quando si aiutano gli utenti a registrare e a salvare sul loro disco fisso possono consultare liberamente sullo schermo del Pc?

La legislazione tedesca, citata nella lettera aperta, consente (anche se non “raccomanda” come sostenuto da Philip) la registrazione di una copia dei contenuti trasmessi via Internet, purché essa sia realizzata solo per proprio uso privato. Il gestore di YouTube-Mp3.org sostiene inoltre di non aver mai adoperato le Api di YouTube per fornire il servizio di ripping.

Difficile comunque che questi distinguo possano far breccia fra gli avvocati di YouTube: i termini di servizio della piattaforma sono piuttosto chiari e proibiscono lo scaricamento dei contenuti; c'è da chiedersi piuttosto come mai Google si sia mossa solo ora. Un contentino alle major dell'audiovisivo, in vista di una accordo per la fornitura di contenuti dedicati pensati appositamente per YouTube? È una delle ipotesi che circolano.

La lettera aperta di ‘Philip’ da: http://www.youtube-mp3.org/help-us

We need your help!

To our users,

A few days ago we have received a cease and desist letter from Harris Cohen who is one of YouTube lawyers. Google is accusing us to threaten your safety and wanted us to close this service. If we wouldn't comply they threatened to sue us. Unfortunately Google has just blocked all of our servers from accessing YouTube so we had to disable all conversion functionality.

We refused to close this service and asked if would be possible to speak to an YouTube representative for finding a solution that would be in the interest of all our users. Since there are tens of millions of real people using this service we thought Google would be willing to have a quick chat. But the opposite was the case: There was no interest whatsoever for a simple call; they don't care about all these people that want to use such a service. We would estimate that there are roughly 200 million people across the world that make use of services like ours and Google doesn't just ignore all those people they are about to criminalize them. With the way they are interpreting and created their TOS everyone of those 200 million users is threatened to be sued by Google.

We never put any of our users at risk and have taken measures to protect them from all sorts of threats. Those measures did cost us a lot of money but we didn't care about that because we have never been profit-oriented but user-oriented. To name a few:

• More than 65% of all page-impressions never had a single advertisement on it. We could have easily filled those page-impressions with ads: bad ads. We haven't done it because we don't believe that running gambling, pornographic or fraudulent ads is acceptable. Those ads would have been payed pretty well but we choose our users over that money.
• We never ran pop-ups. Another decision that lowered the profit drastically.
• Our own infrastructure never stored any logs on disk to protect you from exactly what is happening right now.

We are asking us what has happened to Google. It wasn't long ago they lived by their "don't be evil" philosophy and did what the users wanted. Nowadays they are ignoring millions of users but refer to their questionable good intentions if they are ignoring the "TOS" of others to increase their profitability. To give a few examples:

Google News

A great service but there was a huge outcry in Germany. Most large publishers didn't want Google to scrape content off their sites and profit from that. What has Google done? They have referred to their intentions to provide a good service for its users and ignored the publishers. This whole topic got so popular that even the German Government is about to intervene and plans to stop Google by passing a new law.

Google Books

Another great service but there are also publishers and authors that don't want their books to be scanned. Does Google care about this? Of course they don't.

Our service on the other hand is requested and used by millions of people. Compared to Google News our Government has publicly recommended its citizens to make use of so called YouTube recorders/converters. The rise of such software couldn't even have been unexpected for Google since it has happened with other technologies in the past as well. The fact that Google is creating such recording software also is particularly exciting:

• After the radio has been invented people could make use of casette recorders to make a copy of the program.
• After the tv has been invented you could use a video recorder. Nowadays you can use a more modern product like Google TV

How you can help us:

- Write a complaint e-mail to Harris Cohen or the public address of YouTube.

- Write about this on your Blog or post this on your Facebook page.

- If you are Larry Page or Sergey Brin: Contact me.

Disclaimer: This text might contain spelling- and grammar-errors. It has been written early in the morning by a person whose native language isn't English and hadn't enough sleep for the past months because running this service was a 24/7 job.

All the best,

Philip