Thursday, October 18, 2007

More Stupid G*ogle Censorship

A blog devoted to doings in the California city of Claremont last month found PDF copies of the pay stubs of all city employees on the city website. The blog put copies of the stubs up in in their original pictorial form. The council objected and complained to G*ogle that the images violated their "copyright". Pay stubs are copyright? There is a post here which points out what a legal fiction that is.

But G*ogle bought the argument and deleted the post. So the blogger just put up the same information in text form -- which apparently passed muster.

It seems that you can get G*ogle to censor anything if you can make even the shallowest claim that it is "copyright".

Slashdot has a good point too: "according to California law, the compensation of public employees is public information" So the city had no real grounds for its hysteria -- which is why it trotted out the phony "copyright" claim. It reflects very poorly on G*ogle that it bought into the nonsense.