My first response was, "I'm not saying "Yay Prince!" But then thinking about it, I realized that, were we talking about the way CBS steals Monthly Review's content and makes money off it, and engages in SEO warfare against MR, I take that back. I say, "Yay! Prince" since most assuredly if MR sued CBS, or could at least use the threat of a suit to force CBS to do right by MR, I'd be saying "Yay MR!"
Given the actually existing world we live in, if Monthly Review could force CBS to make proper attributions and/or compensate them for their content, I would love to see CBS get sued.
Yes, yes: I am mostly assuredly a fan putting it to CBS on behalf of MR. It really chaps my ass when I search for an article published in MR and find it, not on MR.org, but on Bnet. I was looking for a Samir Amin article several months ago and could only ever find links to CBS's Bnet in the first 6 results.
And just like Google and Prince, it's sure as shit not because CBS cares about marxist analyses of the economy. It's simply because they want MR's content. They want me to land at Bnet, before I land at MR, whenever I do a search on content that is likely to be on MR. They want my page impression so CBS can collect the advertising buck. It's a huge numbers game. The more even mistaken page views the get, the more money they make. So, they make damn good and sure they've done the most they can to be THE source for MR articles, and you can tell by looking at their SEO technniques that it's all out war on MR. What CBS wants is that MR keeps producing content so CBS can lift it, dominate the search engine results pages with the top listings, and push MR further and further down.
To make matters worse:
1. They don't properly attribute the article to MR 2. They don't link back to MR's author pages 2. They provide a link back to MR, not on each article page, but on the MR archive page at Bnet. 3. They are engaged in SEO warfare, using various SEO tricks to avoid even giving any page rank to MR. In other words, CBS has decent page rank and by linking to MR, they **could** pass that page rank on to MR, helping MR rank higher in search results. But Bnet uses every trick in the SEO warfare playbook to not just deny them their page rank, but to actually hurt MR's page rank.
So, the fuckstains get to use MR's content for linkbait in order to get searchers to end up at Bnet. Then, they refuse to actually give anything back to MR for the free fucking content in at least four different ways.
The whole thing just chaps my ass. I wrote those shits a nastygram. Of course, I never got a response. All I asked the shits to do was link back to MR - properly! As far as I'm concerned, Bnet can host MR articles all day long - IF they are linking properly, giving attribution, and sharing their high page rank. Good for MR! But they're not.
so, I guess I'm just a capitalist tool, but I think MR should demand that Bnet take their content down or properly credit them. The latter would be preferable, to me, since, were Bnet to make right by MR, the best thing for MR would be the link and page rank from Bnet. The point, just as I wish MR could go after CBS, think it's perfectly a-ok for Prince to sue Google for using his content to make money, the same way CBS uses MR's content to make money.
As an aside, Ken Auletta covers that issue, of Google's hypocrisy, in his book, Googled. He shows how Larry and Brin expect that they can sue people for the use of their brand, how they can expect to protect their intellectual property from theft, at the same time as they run Youtube and, for a long time, insisted that they just couldn't possibly stop people from uploading pirated music videos and the like.
He similarly covers their hypocrisy when they insist that they just want information to be free, by scanning books for Google Books. Well, they don't want information to be free at all. They want it to be their content, so that they can make money on the advertising dollars that the content helps them generate. Similarly, they want any and all videos to be their content, and have no incentive to take any of it down, so they can use it to make money on advertising. It's "free" to the consumer, but only because advertisers are paying Google, covering their development costs and lining their pockets with profit.