I mean, LOSE in any BIG way. They sometimes pay small (to them) million dollar fines for their nefarious monopoly activity. Some country in Europe somewhere gets upset at the way they MANIPULATE their search engine. They don't care.
Blogspot is, of course, rife with abuse. Not HERE on THIS blog, but on thousands upon thousands, where parasites make money and/or feed their arrogant egotism by offering blatantly illegal downloads of obviously copyrighted material. Google, heh heh, says "SO? How do WE know? YOU have to be the copyright owner because WE aren't going to ask our lovable anonymous bloggers to show proof."
Go ahead, use GOOGLE's search engine and type in a favorite artist or album, and add Zippyshare or Blogspot and see what happens.
One of the many tentacles of Google is something called "Google Wallet." Jumping in where even the semi-moral PAYPAL refused to do, Google saw a way to make millions and millions by brokering deals for bootleggers, pornographers, thieves, and crooks of all kind. BUT...after many years, I noticed this notice on a Videoscreams catalog that arrived in the mail:
WHAT? NO more GOOGLE PAYMENTS? The Evil Empire has ceased and desisted?
REMARKABLE. They may just be figuring out some new, twisted, even more subversive and impossible variation, but for now, drug addicts and gun freaks must pay cash. And this hampers fairly benign outfits like Videoscreams, which has run a gray area website for 25 years without too much of a hassle. Why? They aren't greedy or stupid. They don't blatantly offer the latest movies or copies of DVDs you can get via Amazon. Perhaps less pleasant are the people who bootleg Broadway shows, for example, and used Google Wallets when Paypal listened to complaints and shut them down. You might argue that selling camcorder footage of a Broadway show negates any reason to see the show...especially when the DVD is $10 and a decent seat is $150. So the people on IOFFER who used to use Google Payments are stuck with "send me a check," unless they manage to keep getting fresh Paypal accounts after being stopped...which isn't THAT hard to do.
Videoscreams tend to offer a lot of cult junk that's fallen through the cracks because nobody knows who owns the rights anymore. In the rock area, that includes "The Acid Test," with The Grateful Dead, "Glastonbury Fayre" a 1971 concert featuring Arthur Brown, Family and others, "Blue Suede Shoes" (Freddie Fingers, Bill Haley etc. circa 1980) and "Lambert and Stamp," something or other featuring Roger Daltrey and Terence Stamp. Think any major DVD company could make money on any of it? Since YouTube (another Google division) often offers this kind of stuff FREEEEE, and there are sneaky forums where the items are offered for download, these guys can maybe get $10 apiece, and good luck to them.
They also offer stupid Dinosaur and Sword and Sandle movies, sci-fi nonsense, "exploitation" and violent junk from the "glory days" of the 60's and 70's, and lost porn that barely (ha ha) made it to VHS. But now...no "GOOGLE WALLET" payment.
Is it possible that Google, like most every big business, is beginning to make mistakes? You know, like Coke did in changing its formula? Is it possible that various corporations are so tired of losing money to Google that they are fighting back? Google's YouTube has actually had to cooperate with TV networks and movie studios and record labels, and allow THEM to make money on what had been uploaded illegally. YouTube has ALMOST made it possible to go through their hoops and get a DMCA takedown without spending all morning filling in their forms and giving them every detail of your life. Google still finds it necessary to get even and post the DMCA's they get on their supposedly independent LUMEN database so that the bootleggers can find it and do their harassment and hacking. The site used to be called "chilling effects" but Google realized this was too daunting and sinister even for them. Telling rights owner they'd get a "chilling effect" by having their DMCA's posted, with faint redacting of a phone number, was just a BIT too BIG BROTHER-like.
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