alt Hacker News> However, the existence of pirates is a stitch in my craw, particularly when any schoolmarm typing the name of my software into Google is prompted to try stealing it instead:
I wonder whether Google, in its Don't Be Evil era, ever considered what they should do about software piracy, and what they decided.
I'd guess they would've decided to either discourage piracy, or at least not encourage it.
In the screenshot, the Google search query doesn't say anything about wanting to pirate, yet Google is suggesting piracy, a la entrapment.
(Though other history about that user may suggest a software piracy tendency, but still, Google knows what piracy seeking looks like, and they special-case all sorts of other topics.)
Is the ethics practice to wait to be sued or told by a regulator to stop doing something?
Or maybe they anticipate costs and competition for how they operate, and lobby for the regulation they want, so all they have to do is be compliant with it, and be let off the hook for lawsuits?
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(Disclaimer: no special knowledge of Google, all below is solely my opinion and not to be considered as factual.)
Google's revenue model is and has always been web first. The more business happening on the web, the better it is for Google writ large, especially back when competing with Microsoft was a larger priority in that space.
It's much harder to pirate a web app, for obvious reasons, than a desktop app. Desktop apps being easy to pirate shifts professional software developers on the margin towards more web apps, which means more commercial activity centered on the web, which is is good for Google. So one could imagine pretty good business reasons to be at least blasé on the topic.
"Piracy" today is not stealing IP. It's not even what it used to mean, when it was originally used to describe rogue publishers who violated copyright. IP laws as used today against private downloaders and users are the legalization of plundering of people who do the equivalent of hear a fact/idea and act on it or use it. IP cannot be stolen, an "immunity from plundering" fee is what's being paid (license). The whole justification for it with software, namely copying from disc/internet to local storage, and then copying from local storage into RAM, is a legal formality to facilitate this plundering.
It is plundering those who didn't pay you for legal immunity.