Innovation is illegal
New, interesting technologies on the web are often criticized, sued and sometimes even ruined by the court rulings. There are a lot of lawsuits on new technologies.
Let's bring a few important technologies that were(are?) considered illegal by some people:
- Google (and other search engines) - deep linking. I remember the days when people said that deep linking is not fair. There were even court rules forbidding it.
- Google cache. They just copy my website, breaking my terms of service, this must be illegal.
- Youtube. Do I have to add anything more?
- Google street view. It's illegal to put the photo of my house on the web! My friend can do it but Google for sure is breaking the law.
- Google news. You can't get my news and aggregate it legally. Can you?
- Google books/print. They're doing illegal copies!
- Internet radio. Yep. It's also considered illegal.
- P2p: Thepiratebay, Napster, Kazaa, and others. Users can break the law using p2p so we must forbid it. Hmmm, people can break the law using cars but they're allowed...
- Mplayer. The first major movie player that just works. It supports almost all video formats. You can't use it in some countries.
- Polar Rose - face search engine. People are looking at your public photos all the time. But when a search engine is doing it - it must be wrong.
- Voip. I remember the fears about VoIP, the telecoms were accused of abusing the internet usage that will result in internet congestion. That were the middle ages of internet, but some fears remained.
- Online gambling is not legalised everywhere.
Don't forget about bad companies that created Iphone, Chrome and Earth. Those companies should be banned from creating new software! They should be like Microsoft and produce only upgrades. Oh, sorry, Vista also had problems.
By definition, innovation is changing the status quo. Someone is making money on it, others are out of business.
Innovation is often on the edge of the law. The law is adopted afterwards.
In my opinion most of interesting, innovative, technologies on the web can be accused of breaking copyright or patent laws. Accept it and get a good lawyer on your next startup.
And remember, in this game the last man standing wins.
