While copyright issues online are such a new-area of the judicial review system, it’s becoming more clear that rights are being favored towards the creator of the content. Google, in it’s effort to index the world, has been overwhelmed with copyright infringement issues, trademark issues, et al. It’s not suprising.
There is a terrible online scourge that are individuals who wish to simply provide themselves with revenue without doing any of the real work, like writing. Recently, a journalist from a traditional newspaper, referenced lonnypaul.com in a print article that discussed blogging. He couldn’t understand why people who quote other people’s work without just writing it themselves.
Some spats between copyright holders and Internet companies are inevitable. Search engine operators would like to index, sort, and regurgitate photographs, videos and text found on the Web without forking over licensing fees. Copyright holders, on the other hand, want to make more money from their content.
And some disputes do settle amicably. On Wednesday, the Associated Press announced that it had resolved a dispute with Google over the use of its headlines and photographs.
For its part, Google says it values copyright and points out that it allows copyright holders to opt out of having their content included in the company’s search products. Copyright holders, however, say its impractical for millions of people to opt out of hundreds of search engines. Still, Google says its expectations are reasonable.
“One of the challenges is, ‘This is Google. What would the world be without Google?’ We don’t want the world without Google. We want the world without Google infringing our copyrights.”
–Russell Frackman, attorney representing Perfect 10 in its lawsuit against Google“People kind of forget that we have a lot of our own copyrights to protect and that copyright law is a big part of that protection,” said Alexander Macgillivray, a lawyer at Google. “We’re a search engine that exists and knows it exists only because of the tremendous impact of creators.”
[ Source: Google's copyright tussles | CNET News.com ]
