Google and the law: empirical approaches to legal aspects of knowledge-economy business models

403 Pages·2012·4.61 MB·English

by  Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella (auth.)

Information Technology and Law Series
Volume 22
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Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella
Editor
Google and the Law
Empirical Approaches to Legal Aspects
of Knowledge-Economy Business Models
123
Dr. Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella
Universidad deAlicante
Ap.99
03080Alicante
Spain
ISSN 1570-2782
ISBN 978-90-6704-845-3 e-ISBN978-90-6704-846-0
DOI 10.1007/978-90-6704-846-0
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Contents
1 Introduction: Google Pushing the Boundaries of Law . . . . . . . . . . 1
Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella
2 The Power of Google: First Mover Advantage or Abuse
of a Dominant Position?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Sophie van Loon
3 Google AdWords: Trade Mark Law and Liability
of Internet Service Providers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Jeremy Phillips
4 Google and Personal Data Protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Bart van der Sloot and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius
5 Google News and Copyright. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Raquel Xalabarder
6 Copyright Issues Regarding Google Images and Google Cache . . . 169
Miquel Peguera
7 The ‘‘Viacom v YouTube’’ Litigation and Section 512(c) DMCA:
When the Safe Harbour Becomes a Permanent Mooring. . . . . . . . 203
Annsley Merelle Ward
8 Looking Beyond the Google Books Settlement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Gary Rinkerman
9 Google Chrome and Android: Legal Aspects
of Open Source Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Malcolm Bain
vii
viii Contents
10 Google, APIs and the Law. Use, Reuse and Lock-In . . . . . . . . . . 287
Andrew Katz
11 Paradoxes, Google and China: How Censorship can Harm
and Intellectual Property can Harness Innovation. . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Danny Friedmann
12 The International Dimension of Google Activities: Private
International Law and the Need of Legal Certainty. . . . . . . . . . . 329
Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella
13 In Search of Alterity: On Google, Neutrality and Otherness . . . . 355
Marcelo Thompson
Chapter 1
Introduction: Google Pushing
the Boundaries of Law
Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella
Allow me to recall the first time I heard about Google. It was in the beginning of
2000. I was working in Brussels. A colleague of mine recommended me a new
websearchenginethatwasfarquickerthantheonesweusedtoworkwithatthat
time.ThefirstimpressionIgotwasnotverygood:thehomepagewasallinwhite
andnotveryattractive.Butmyfriendinsistedonhowfastitwasandheconstantly
made me check the upper side of the results where the astonishing figure of the
approximate results and the time used to produce them are shown. Although the
numberofresults wasincredibleandthetime wasusually lessthanaquarter ofa
second,Iwas notimpressed. The reason might have been that,at that time, Iwas
expecting an Internet portal to provide not only a web search engine but also
content. Therefore, I kept working with other web search engines.
Little by little Google started tocome up more often inconversations with my
friendsandcolleagues.Duetothis,andinfluencedbytheneedofbeingup-to-date,
I started to use Google. More important than this was that, during those conver-
sations,thesamequestionalwayscameup:howdoesGooglemakemoney?Only
oneofmyfriendshadananswer—‘‘thankstoadvertising!’’,andheexplainedtous
theGoogleAdWordsservice—‘‘companiespayGooglefordisplayingsmalladsin
the rightside of the screen related tothe wordsyou introduce inthe search box’’.
Noneofuscouldimaginethatsuchaservicemighthavetheimplicationsfortrade
mark law explained by Jeremy Phillips in Chap. 3 of this work. Basically, at that
time, the only thing my colleagues and I thought was that our friend was ‘‘nuts’’
SeniorLecturerPrivateinternationallaw,LecturerandCoordinatoroftheITModuleofthe
MagisterLvcentinvsonIntellectualProperty.
A.Lopez-Tarruella(&)
UniversityofAlicante,Alicante,Spain
e-mail:[email protected]
A.Lopez-Tarruella(ed.),GoogleandtheLaw, 1
InformationTechnologyandLawSeries22,DOI:10.1007/978-90-6704-846-0_1,
(cid:2)T.M.C.ASSERPRESS,TheHague,TheNetherlands,andtheauthor(s)2012
2 A.Lopez-Tarruella
andthatsuchawebsitecouldnotsurvive.Inourdefense,ithastoberecalledthat
that was the time when the ‘‘dot-com bubble’’ exploded.
TimehasshownthatmyfriendwasrightandIwasterriblywrong.InFebruary
2010, the company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 19971 had almost
20,000employeesanditsmarketvaluewasUSD136,383,466,440.2InFiscalYear
2010,GooglerevenuesamountedtoUSD29,321million(48%fromtheUS,10%
for UK, 42% from the rest of the world). Ninety six percent of those revenues
came from advertising, the remaining 4% came from licensing of its search
technology to other companies.3
WhatIdidnotunderstandin2000butwhichGoogledidperfectly,wasthat,in
today’s knowledge economy, information has become a ‘‘commodity’’. There is
plenty of information on the world wide web. Everyone has access to it. If your
business is providing information (content), it has to be very good to make it
valuable in comparison to the information provided by others. If not, you cannot
make money with it.
Whatisvaluableistheorganizationofthatinformation.Googleunderstoodthis
from the beginning. In 2000, search engines were provided as ancillary to other
servicesandcontentprovidedbyInternetportals(andatleastmostofthepeopleI
knewatthattimewasexpectingthoseotherservices).Googledecidedtofocuson
thethingtheydidbest:search.Googlebecamesuccessfulbecausetheydesigneda
search engine that was better and faster at finding the right answer than other
search engines at the time.
Broadly speaking, the success of Google’s search engine is founded on three
elements. First, the use of very powerful software programs called crawlers or
‘‘Googlebots’’ to constantly search the web for updates of sites which they have
already indexed and for new information uploaded. Second, a very efficient
technologytoindexallthe informationfound bythese crawlers. Third, theuse of
morethan200criteriathatallowsauser,whentypingawordinthesearchbox,to
find the most relevantwebsite related tothat word. Among those 200 criteria, the
most important is PageRank(cid:3), an algorithm protected by patent in the US, and
which determines the relevance of a web site according to the links that other
websites include to it. This is claimed to be a ‘‘democratic’’ way to establish the
relevance of a website. Placement in search results is not sold to companies by
Google.Itisexclusivelybasedonthepopularityofthewebsiteontheweb.Search
results are listed taking into account what users have linked to—which is usually
anindicationoftheirappreciation,notaccordingtowhichcompanypaysthemost.
1 ‘‘Google’’, is a play on the word ‘‘googol’’, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100
zeros. The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists, and the scope of
Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.SeeGoogleHistory,availableathttp://www.google.es/intl/en/corporate/history.html(last
accessed29thAugust2011).
2 http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog(lastaccessed30thAugust2011).
3 http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html(lastaccessed29thAugust2011).
1 Introduction:GooglePushingtheBoundariesofLaw 3
Having attracted the attention of users thanks to the efficiency of their search
engine,Googlestartedtomonetizeitsservicesin2000bysellingadvertisingspace
to companies.4 As previously mentioned, this is done by means of Google
AdWords.Inthisservice,advertisersselectwordsandphrasesthatarerelevantto
theirbusinessaskeywords.WhenpeopleuseGoogletosearchforthosekeywords,
upto11‘‘sponsoredlinks’’aredisplayedalongsidethesearchresults.Eachtimea
user clicks one of those sponsored links, the advertiser pays Google.
The idea of providing services for free and to indirectly generate revenues
throughadvertisingisnotnew.Forinstance,itisusedbypublicTVchannelsand
free newspapers. However, there are important particularities that make Google’s
advertising system particularly successful:
a) ads in Google are contextualized and personalized: they relate to the infor-
mation in the web page where they are displayed and they are personalized to
thesearchesmadebytheuseraccessingtheinformation.AdWordsonlyshows
sponsoredlinksthatarerelatedtothetermsintroducedbytheuserinthesearch
box: if the user looks for shoes, ‘‘sponsored links’’ of shoe companies will be
displayed. This is extremely interesting for companies—they have more pos-
sibilities to sell their products or services—and users—the ads they see are
related to things they are interested in. While advertising on TV and other
media can also be contextualized, the possibilities are much more limited. In
addition to this, ads may change depending on the information Google has
about the users visiting their web sites. As is explained later, Google works
reallyhardingatheringthisinformationsinceitisessentialfortheiradvertising
services. As an example, ads might be personalized depending on the geo-
graphiclocationoftheuser:companiesmaydecidethattheir‘‘sponsoredlinks’’
are only displayed if the user accesses Google from a computer with an IP
address in a country where they offer their products.5
b) Google provides services worldwide. This means that companies interested in
subscribingtotheGoogleAdWordsservicesarelocatedanywhereintheworld.
Atthesametime,thesecompaniesknowthatbyusingtheseservices,theycan
reachusersanywhere.Whileintheorythisisalsopossibleinothermedia,only
a few companies can afford to make the investment this requires. With Ad-
Words, SMEs and individuals can easily promote their products and services
anywhere in the world.
c) Pricesof‘‘sponsoredlinks’’arenotfixed.Inordertogetagoodpositioninthe
list of sponsored links companies have to bid. While Google provides an
estimatedminimumbidneededtogetonthefirstpageofsearchresults,itdoes
notensurethatthebestbidwillautomaticallygetthefirstposition.Theranking
ofthedifferentsponsoredlinksisdeterminedbyacombinationofthebidmade
bytheadvertiserwhenselectingthekeywordandtheso-called‘‘qualityscore’’,
4 Internet advertising only represents 10% of the total advertising market, however Internet
advertisingkeepsgrowingincomparisonwithothersegmentsofthismarket.
5 Peguera2010,p358.
4 A.Lopez-Tarruella
basedonrelevance(howwelltheadmatchesauser’squery),thequalityofthe
landing page that the ad links to (the value of its content and how quickly it
loads), andthe ad’spastclickthroughrate (or,ifitis new,therate ofasimilar
ad), along with other criteria Google does not want to reveal.6
d) Advertisers in Google AdWords only pay if users click on the ad (‘‘cost per
click’’). This last characteristic distinguishes Google from most online and
traditional media advertisers and makes the service extremely attractive. Fur-
thermore, Google enables advertisers to easily track the results of their cam-
paigns—thanks to Google AdWords or Google Analytics, and helps them to
improve their advertising strategy.
Since 2000 Google keeps improving its search engine with technologies like
‘‘autocomplete’’or‘‘GoogleInstant’’havinginmindthatthemostimportantthing
is to provide users as fast as possible with what they are looking for. Thanks to
this, at present, Google’s global search engine’s market share is 90.59%.7 In
February 2010, it was reported that, worldwide, there were more than 3 billion
searches on Google per day.8
But more important than this, Google has impressively expanded its offer of
servicesandapplicationswithoneandthesameideainmind:attractInternettrafficto
their web sites. This offer includes web-applications—Gmail, GoogleCalendar,
GoogleReader,GoogleDocsorGoogleMusic—improvementsorspecificapplications
ofthesearchengine—GoogleNews,GoogleImages,GooglePatents,GoogleScholar,
etc. – a social network—Google ? - or a combination of services and content—
GoogleMaps, GoogleStreetView, GoogleEarth, YouTube or GoogleBooks. It also
providestools for users that wanttopublish their own content—Blogger for blogs,
GoogleSitesforpersonalwebsitesorYouTubeforaudiovisualworks—helpingwith
thedevelopmentoftheso-calledWeb2.0.9
Attracting Internet traffic is also the reason why Google provides the Chrome
webbrowser,theChromeoperatingsystem10—forPC,laptopsandnetbooks—and
the different versions of the Android operating system—for smartphones and
6 See‘‘AnatomyofanAuction’’,WiredMaganize,Issue12.06,availableathttp://www.wired.com/
special_multimedia/2009/nep_googlenomics_auction.(lastaccessed29thAugust2011).
7 http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-monthly-200807-201108-bar.(lastaccessed29th
August2011).
8 http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709 (last
accessed29thAugust2011).
9 A complete list of Google services and products is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_Google_products(lastaccessed29thAugust2011).
10 The Chrome OS is open-sourced under the Chromium OS project, available at http://
www.chromium.org/chromium-os(lastaccessed29thAugust2011).