Hacker News Reader

Comment by atularora | Hacker News Reader

Some perceive Google's stand with hypocrisy e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/counternotions/status/3256864602692403...

That tweet is drawing a very specious connection. Android did not, as far as I can tell, copy any of Apple's algorithms or piggyback on top of them. It is a novel implementation of some of the same ideas in the iPhone.

Similarly, it's plagiarism if you take a Harry Potter book and publish your own version with the names changed, but James Patterson's "Witch & Wizard" has a copyright of its own despite being rather similar in concept.

(Edited to remove question about phrasing thanks to atularora's clarification.)

standby -> stand. Sorry for the typo

The tweet author might be referring to recent claims that Android contains non-licensed Sun code.

That could be, but it would make even less sense to me. If they're talking about copying Apple, at least they did copy something from Apple, if only an idea. The copyright infringement claims have never been substantiated at all — it's just an accusation.

While Android it obviously inspired by iOS, it's not a direct copy. A better example of Google's hypocrisy is their outright copying news articles into Google News despite the source companies asking them not to.

Healines and snippits, and they respect robots.txt. The full articles they have are licensed from the AP.

What about the case of TripAdvisor?

TripAdvisor says "Google, don't copy our reviews for Google places."

Google says "The only way we won't copy your content is if you opt-out of completely."

TA says "We can't do that, you're the only search engine there is."

Google just laughs maniacally.

http://www.tnooz.com/2010/12/08/news/google-places-blocked-f... http://www.tnooz.com/2011/01/11/news/tripadvisor-content-on-...

I don't see how that's relevant at all. Google gave them the option of not being indexed. They decided they would rather be indexed by Google than not. The complaint that TripAdvisor doesn't get precise, fine-grained control over what Google does with its index seems like a fairly different issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com