Posted inInformation Technology / Investing / Publishing

First Aereo – Now Google

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

In an absolutely stunning move the Supreme Court might have justified its existence with the Aereo ruling.  Most citizens had lost hope and faith in the institution with their ruling allowing corporations to patent and extract license fees for genes existing naturally in humans in plants.  They single handedly allowed corporate greed to eliminate public variety seed placing in jepordy the world food supply as population quickly approaches 9 billion.  And let’s not forget the corporate sponsored ruling “money is speech.”  That ruling has truly cleaned up politics…NOT!

Much of that changed with the Aereo ruling.  There is hope that the justices have finally returned to the human race.  With the rise of the Internet came the rise of “piracy is okay” mentality.  “Surf for everything, pay for nothing” has become the motto of far too many.  Far too many companies have adopted the “steal what others create and sell it as your own” mentality as well.  Aereo is just the latest in thinking they can get away with it.

We now know exactly what the ruling will be when the case of Google scanning printed books which had/have valid copyright in place at time of scanning, and placing them whole or in part on the Internet to both enhance the Google image and make money.  They can claim “public good” and “service for the people” all they want, same as Aereo.  It did not change the copyright law.  You are not allowed to use copyrighted material on your “service” without obtaining permission/license from the holder of said copyright.

No author would be allowed to give 100% of Google’s advertising away without paying Google even one red cent no matter how much “public service” and “public good” we claimed raising awareness of our products would do.  When you give away an author’s work for free you starve the author.  Google would be the first to lawyer up if an author tried to starve them by giving away all of Google’s advertising revenue.

Now is the time to push this case to the Supreme Court.  Aereo “changed the form” from airwave to Internet without paying the copyright holder.  Google “changed the form” from print to Internet without paying the copyright holder.  It appears rather cut & dry to people who actually work for a living.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.