Onto the main post: the fundamental problem is Google is allowed to make money off other people’s IP and content. Yes, you can set up a website to be unsearchable, but that STILL DOES NOT STOP GOOGLE FROM MAKING MONEY FROM IT.

I like Google. I think Google is good for tech. However, at some point, Google is going to start acting a bit to monopolistic to slide by and if they’re Golden Goose (search) ever gets gutted, a lot of nice things are going to go bye-bye on the Internet.

Google needs to police themselves.

This is the point where we disagree, I think. From my point of view, linking someone’s name to some product does make it seem as if they approve of that product.

Rog>Have you Trademarked your name?

No, I haven’t. I don’t need to do that to defend myself from libel, so why should I have to do it to defend myself from ads that associate me with products with which I don’t want to be associated?

Different countries have different “personality rights” that protect individuals to a greater or lesser degree. For example, Germany allows people whose names are used without permission to sue for damages if the names are used for “enrichment” (and advertising counts as enrichment). http://personalityrightsdatabase.com/index.php?title=Germany

Rog>having expectations of entitlement over your personal name

So those game-farming ads were there because some other Richard Bartle who wrote some other book called Designing Virtual Worlds was worth hanging an ad off?

I agree that there are problems with so many people having the same name. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done about it, though. I’m not a lawyer, but it looks to me as if German law would allow a Tom Cruise who wasn’t a film star to advertise shoes if it was made clear which Tom Cruise it was doing the advertising; likewise, any articles linking Tom Cruise to a mad cult would have to be clear which Tom Cruise was being linked to it.

Names are just labels, but people are people. If they share a name, you need to be more specific about who they are (eg. show a picture) if you want to talk about the person. Advertising which merely attaches itself to labels can’t do that; this raises the question as to whether it should be allowed. It certainly doesn’t feel great to be on the receiving end of it…

Richard

I share my full name with the drummer from Foghat. He’s not universally known, but it means I’m often subjected to his whims and while I’m sure he’s a nice guy, I’m not terribly appreciative of it.

My girlfriend notes that searching for her full name brings up pornstar results. She’s not bitter about that, she just laughs. Why should she have control over a name that’s fairly common?

Here’s a question: Have you Trademarked your name?

Tom Cruise gets benefits from his Trademarked name that I wholly and unequivocally disagree with, but at least he took that step. Sting on the other hand got laughed out of court when a kid brought a dictionary as his lawyer.

Welcome to the World Wide Web.

Once you collect so many people together, having expectations of entitlement over your personal name– dammit if you were someone else, I’d have pretty nasty things to say about that.

I’ll say it for Tom Cruise. He can shove his Trademarked name, I don’t respect it one whit.

If Gold Seller Company tries to claim that Richard Bartle buys gold or wants you to buy gold, then they’ve obviously stepped over the line. The mere fact that they want their advertisements to appear to whoever happens to be searching for information on Richard Bartle is NOT stepping over the line.

You could run a story about Tom Cruise’s religious beliefs and in the corner of the screen pop an advertisement to buy shoes, or cut to a commercial to buy shoes. You could even run a story about Tom Cruise’s religious beliefs, and then show a commercial from the Mormons, of which Tom Cruise is not a member. As long as Tom Cruise’s image isn’t directly a part of your advertisement and you’re not making an effort to make it appear that Tom Cruise endorses your product, then you’re probably fine.

I’m sure you don’t think that every time a celebrity appears on the news, or does an interview, or appears in a magazine article, or one of their works appears, that they are given the option to decide on what sort of advertisements will appear.

So I could indeed use Tom Cruise’s image to sell shoes? Even if I hadn’t paid him and he didn’t wear the make of shoes I was selling? I could just take a publicity photo of him and as “payment” for hosting it on my web site use it to advertise shoes?

Richard

It goes on all the time in print and television. It’s almost unheard of for the subject of any media to have a say in what sort of advertising goes to support that media.

The purchase of pants is a precondition to venturing outside in most places. So the pants are your outdoors access fee. Once you are outdoors, you are not compelled to enter any paid establishment.

Pants allow you to do so much more than go to the cinema. Pants allow you to visit many places which are free – down by the harbour, the beach, maybe up in the mountains at a lookout – or just a stroll down the street to the local park. In fact, there are likely thousands times more free places you could go with your pants than there are places which require paid entry.

Suppose the cost of pants rises. Perhaps a rapper gets elected president, and the first law he introduces is that everyone must wear gold-lined diamond-studded parachute pants 20 sizes too big for the wearer.

Suddenly, we’d be faced with a situation where we have much less disposable income, and are therefore much less willing to spend it on luxuries such as cinemas. If I had to pay $10,000 to leave the house, I’d be expecting an awful lot to be provided to me in compensation – or I’ll choose instead to stay at home and forgo the pants.

Now for the economics. You asked, “Why should I have to pay money to go to the cinema?” And the answer is: you don’t *have* to pay money to go to the cinema. You *choose* to pay for only two reasons:

1. They ask you to pay
2. You believe the cost is commensurate with the entertainment value of paying

Your outdoors access pass – your pants – were insufficient to grant you access to the cinema, because the cinema has imposed point #1 on you. That is their choice. This leaves you with a choice of whether or not you wish to pay an additional charge, which is where point #2 comes in.

Note that I haven’t mentioned anything about *the cinema’s* costs. Consumers do not care about the cinema’s costs – according to economic theory. I don’t care if it costs them $300 billion per year in hiring film reel swappers. I’m not going to pay $40,000 for a movie ticket to help them meet their costs.

The implication of your argument is that I should pay to go to the cinema because it costs money to run a cinema, despite having already paid for my pants. Ergo, I should pay for websites because it costs money to host a website, despite having paid for my internet connection. As pointed out in the previous paragraph, this costs-based argument is irrelevant to consumer purchasing decisions.

Furthermore, this argument doesn’t hold water because I have nigh infinite free alternatives to visiting the cinema. Having already paid for my pants / internet connection, I am going to be less likely to pay additional money for other services, as a simple consequence of the fact that I now have less disposable income. So, the services which are attempting to capture what’s left of my disposable income need to be of higher quality than usual, due to the access fee I have paid.

On the web, my argument is simply this: there are basically zero websites that would meet the criteria of being high enough quality to pay for *on top of* my access fee.

If the internet were free and I could sign up to various sites that I liked for a fee, I’d pick my favourite sites and do that happily. I only visit 7 or 8 sites on a regular basis. However, since I pay a large sum of money every month to get internet access, I am no longer willing to do this. I have scarce resources, resources which are made scarcer by my access fee, which means I need to more frugally preserve what is left.

If everyone’s pants cost $10,000, we would be right in asking “why should I have to pay money to go to the cinema?”