I fought the law and Google won.
The venerable New York Times has a thoughtful piece today discussing how Google deals with litigation. It makes for interesting reading as they go over the various cases that the Mountain View company is currently embroiled in. They are being sued for leaving a company out of search results, they are being sued for selling ad words triggered by a company's name to its competitor, they are being sued for publishing thumbnail portraits from a porn company and they are being sued for deep-scanning published books. They have increased their legal staff from a single lawyer a few years ago to over a hundred today.
This story is understandable on two fronts. First, of course Google is being sued. In a sense, it's more than just the company, it's really the leading edge of Internet business that's under attack. Google is an innovative firm, pushing the edge and they're going to attract attention both from get-rich-quickie artists and people that want to make the world spin faster so they sue God. Because right now, on the Internet, Google is the supreme deity. No other company comes close to their influence and in fact, historical (?) Internet companies have been mostly marginalized, other than cash ([cough]--Yahoo).
The story is also understandable from the sense that they'd aggressively defend themselves. They can't afford to lose a single case, because discovery (the legal process of crawling up your bodily orifices with a flashlight in case you forgot some paperwork up there) would hurt them a lot by exposing their "trade secrets." BTW, when Google talks about trade secrets, they imply that there's some magic formula, like Coca-Cola's, that if made public, would hurt the company. I suspect that it's the opposite--that if people knew how simple their algorithmic approach was and how often they diddle it manually, they'd be upset.
EIther way, Google is out there, hacking through litigious jungle with a legal machete. I wish them well because I agree with their sentiments. Their goals and many of ours coincide--we both want a laissez-faire, open Internet, where any VC can make a buck and it's reasonable for 22 year olds to become billionaires.
Posted on October 23, 2006
