Google Asserts That Property Rights Are Anti-Competitive

forbes.com

8 points·barista··7 comments

The author of the piece, Scott Cleland, is a sort of pundit-for-hire for the telecommunication industry, and more recently, Microsoft (who was among the consortium that won the Nortel patents). Cleland seems to have made a whole career out of generating faux-outrage at Google's behaviour, while in the pay of Google's competitors.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Scott_Cleland

The ignorance and bias reeks throughout the article so bad you can smell it.

He even has his fingers in politics; he served as "Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for telecom trade matters", and served as a "Senior Policy Advisor for Legislative Affairs", under George H.W. Bush.

Just... wow. Fuck this guy.

Common sense tells us free markets cannot exist without enforceable property rights

More like "common sense tells us you are a patent attorney".

Google has a history of playing loosely with digital IP, but to pretend there is nothing more to this argument than Google pounding the table is either unbelievably myopic or downright disingenuous.

This guy must go through keyboards pretty quickly at the rate he uses scare quotes. It may be that there's an argument to be made against Google's stance on these issues, but it certainly isn't made in this trashy piece.

This is about what you should expect from Forbes opinion pieces. They are almost always utter garbage. I've been thinking about contributing some shit of my own, and I do mean shit as I've got plenty of wrong opinions that I'd love to shout from a soapbox.

What bothers me is this garbage keeps getting to the front page.

Funny how "intellectual property rights" got shortened to "property rights". Makes them easier to defend, I guess, since they're "just like physical property". They're not!

Flagged for trolling.

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