Google's Copyright Issues Indicative of Bigger Problem
Old ways of doing business are getting in the way of people who want to use the Internet in new ways. One example is music and movie piracy. Some are ready to download music or movies without compensating the creators and justify it with a childish "its out there so it's mine" entitlement argument I've commented on earlier. The response from the music and movie industry has been self-destructive; they're alienating customers and disinterested third parties, like universities, who have been unwillingly deputized to go after students who download movies. And the fact the the movie industry's MPAA violated GPL copyright with a program they distributed to track downloaders doesn't help their case.
Another example is Google's book project. Rather than respect copyrights and get permission to copy protected works, it has decided to copy first and ask permission later. The Jonathan V. Last takes on this issue in the Weekly Standard. He argues Google is turning the law on its head:
To defend this advantage, Google has adopted a legal defense aimed straight at copyright law. The defense is multipronged, but the two most startling aspects relate to the establishment of the "opt out" option for copyright owners and Google's claim of a transformative nature to the Book Search. Each challenges the current understanding of the copyright in a fundamental way.
This is like yelling "Hey, I'm about to steal your book, telling me if you don't want me to." One would think Google doesn't get to make up new interpretations of law on its own. I thought it was a search engine, not a judiciary. But there seems to be some precedent for this kind of argument but I'm not sure it would withstand serious judicial or public policy review.
Blake Field sued Google for copying and caching 51 works from his website. The court ruled in Google's favor, citing in particular the ease of Google's "opt out" feature, but the decision was based in part on dubious grounds. The court said that Field had "invited" Google's spiders--web robots which crawl through the Internet cataloguing and indexing pages for a search engine--by not including code on his website which discouraged them. In other words, by not telling Google to stay away, Field was asking to have his copyright violated. It's the intellectual property version of "She wore a red dress to the bar on Saturday night."
We clearly need to update copyright laws to better fit with today's technology. That requires public debate and legislation, not companies and downloaders saying we can get away with it so we will.
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