Amazon to Google: Hands off our trade secrets

UPDATE: Yahoo has followed Amazon in fighting Google's "brazen" subpoena of its proprietary, competitive trade secrets. "There is simply no need for Google to be peering into the minds and computers of Yahoo employees," Yahoo's lawyer wrote in a 17-page list of objections delivered to Google last week, according to AP reports.

In "Google to Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon: Hand over confidential, competitive info,” I present Google’s underhanded, hypocritical move to snare direct competitors into revealing confidential, proprietary details of competitive operations to the “do no evil” Google:

Google will apparently do anything to ensure its $122 billion market cap free-content by Google's “fair-use” business model steam rolls on.

Google is using the courts to force Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon to hand over their proprietary, confidential, competitive information to Google in a shrewd, Google-centric ploy in its efforts to fight copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning project…

Google is asking for confidential information from its rivals that it doesn’t disclose itself.

Rather than “do no evil,” a more apt Google slogan is “has no shame.”

In “What Google didn't say: Q3 analyst questions left unanswered” I report on Google’s typical caginess and lack of candor in its public statements. Representative Google non-responses to analysts during its Q3 conference call:

I'd rather not go into the specifics of those deals.

I think if you have had a chance to look at the slides that we have put up, Mary, you will see that.

Way too early to go there, Mary.

Let's go to our next question.

The question is easily answered; we don't give guidance.

Google famously touts the secrecy of its almighty algorithm in a manner suggesting a consumer Internet search and a two-line text advertisement are of the same import as nuclear weapons formulas.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt "confessed" at the Search Engine Strategies Conference last August:

we have many, many new ideas, most of which are highly proprietary…the precise formula of ranking is so proprietary only a small number of people actually in the company know it. And I've chosen not to even know it.

Amazon is fighting direct competitor Google's attempts to profit from its own highly proprietary confidential data, according to AP reports:

Amazon.com has objected to providing details about its book search feature to rival Google, which says it needs them to fight copyright infringement allegations from a group of authors and book publishers.

In a Monday filing, Amazon.com described Google's request, which was made via a subpoena served on Oct. 6, as "overly broad and unduly burdensome" and said it would expose Amazon's trade secrets…

Google wants "essentially all documents concerning Amazon's sale of books on its Web sites, and all searching and indexing functions."

Microsoft and Yahoo are expected to follow Amazon’s stand-up-to-Google lead.