The Week in Tweets: The “Google Discovers the Importance of Intellectual Property?” Edition
by Neil Turkewitz
There were quite a few interesting, and frequently disappointing, developments in the copyright and internet governance space — including Public Knowledge’s vigorous defense of the Internet Archives’ practice of distributing books without authorization or payment to authors, and continued protests from Michael Geist and Julia Reda about South Africa President Ramaphosa’s decision to send their favorite copyright bill back to Parliament. But my favorite discovery of the week was Google’s June 30 submission to the European Commission on the proposed Digital Services Act in which they argued that: “taken too far, data access could enable rivals to reverse-engineer platforms’ proprietary algorithms, thereby enabling free riding and chilling incentives to innovate,” while adding for emphasis that: “It could also undermine incentives to invest in large-scale data collection in the first place.”
As I pondered in my tweet, “why does protecting output to create incentives for creation sound so familiar? Anyone?”
