I'm not trying to defend Google here, but just saying that an act made by an employee at a company is equal to a given strategy by the same company is just ludicrous.
Months is an incredibly short period of time for a large organization. Especially when considering a small, probably low priority group. A large organization isn't like a startup, for a small low priority group the feedback loop isn't daily, its at best weekly and quite possibly longer even monthly (and gets longer as you go up the corporate ladder). What you may identify about a groups activities in a couple weeks at a small company can easily take months in a large company.
I'm much more certain that they aren't stupid than I am certain that they aren't evil.
Awesome; since you seem to have more facts than anyone else in this emotion-laden thread, please lay them out for us. Perhaps you're right; I simply don't know, but since you seem to have evidence of this, I'm sure Google legal would love to see it.
I don't. I just repeated what Nelson Mattos wrote on his blog.
"a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites."
The former is recognised in some laws in some jurisdictions (off the top of my head: In England a company director is responsible for the piracy of their employees during company time, even if the director doesn't know about it and didn't ask for it.)
In my opinion it's fine to say that Google is responsible, even if they didn't know about it. Maybe they need to start improving their governance procedures, especially in cultures where bribery and corruption are rampant. "Don't be evil" should include "don't be evil, even if evil is usual in the region we're working in".