14 DAY TRIAL // Leander Kahney, the guy who wrote one of the most famous books about Steve Jobs (“Inside Steve’s Brain”), is pretty upset with Apple and Google. He’d made a trailer to promote his most recent writing on Apple, and the two technology giants deleted it.
“I’m pretty [expletive] off,” says Kahney, author of Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. “I had hoped better from Apple, a company I’ve followed and been a fan of for decades,” he adds.
He’s (understandably) upset because Google, at Apple’s request, took down his book trailer made to promote the new Jony Ive biography. Google told the author, “We have disabled the following material as a result of a third-party notification from Apple Inc. claiming that this material is infringing.”
The trailer apparently should have been protected by fair use, despite borrowing and re-using existing material in a way that adds new expression and meaning – in short, originality.
But the rules are ambiguous, and “Google’s appeals procedure is byzantine,” writes Kahney, who is planning to register a counter notification to appeal the decision.