Google Subpoenas Microsoft & Yahoo

eldavojohn writes "Mercury News is running a story reporting that Google has filed subpoenas with Microsoft and Yahoo, in relation to their legal battles with publishers and authors. Google faces charges of massive copyright infringement surrounding its online book project. The company claims that Microsoft and Yahoo have taken the exact same steps in acquiring print-related rights. Google therefore wants to show that 'everyone is doing it.'" From the article: "McGraw-Hill Cos. and the Authors Guild, along with other publishers and authors, contend that a Google project to digitize the libraries of four major U.S. universities, as well as portions of the New York Public Library and Oxford University's libraries, ignores the rights of copyright holders in favor of Google's economic self-interest ... Is the library of the future going to be open? Or will it be controlled by a couple of big corporate players?"

Rich get richer

[pembo13]

Neglecting the fact that Google is already 'rich'. Copyright, in its current implementation seems to be in place simply for the rich to get richer. Yet most Americans are in the middle class. So I think its fair to assume that most US-Slashdotters are in the middle class. So how is it that laws, continued by rich, enforced by order of the rich, and that benifit mostly the rich get so much support on /. ? Does the money earned from copyright go directly back to the economy? I was of the (possibly incorrect) understanding that it just goes into the bank account of the rich.

Re:Culture should be free

[jedidiah]

It's not even about "freely accessable publications". This isn't like Google going all project Gutenberg or something. This is only about Google and the given Universities being able to do searches against books: a valid & reasonable fair use of the books in question.

          This kind of thing really isn't even unprecedented. There are similar dead tree references of this sort for other types of dead tree works. The book industry is just trying to be control freak pricks and trying to extract more revenue where they deserve none.

          The federal judges should see this and just say: Piracy? What Piracy? Get the H*LL out of my courtroom and stop wasting my time.

Re:Que: Your parents.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

So, if they get a pass with 'everyone else is doing it', do I get the same if I want do download some songs or MP3s? Can I just tell the **AA that 'everyone else is doing it', and that everyone is a lot higher number than the folks google is talking about.

Well, there is a lot wrong with your post. First, to my knowledge no one in the US has yet been sued for downloading songs, only uploading. Somehow, however, the MPAA has managed to get the term "downloading" into the public consciousness. I always look at these articles that say "downloading" and every time they then mention uploading in the actual case.

Next, "everyone doing something" speaks to part of one of the four fair use criteria for legal copying and republishing of works without a copyright holder's permission (effect upon the market). If you meet all these criteria (as Google seems to) then by all means you can tell the RIAA to shove it, although you may have to go to court to prove it. For example, if you download a song and burn part of it to CD and hand them out to your students as part of their homework on modern culture, you probably have met all the criteria for fair use. and whether the copyright holder likes it or not, they're going to lose if they take you to court.

Dawn of the Information Age

[headkase]

The way people interact with Information needs to be completely re-drawn. I believe what is needed is compulsary licensing of most information. Your Internet bill just had a $25US fee attached to it. And in return you get all the downloads you can suck through the tubes. Seriously. Video, audio, books, and software. Your fee is divided back to the copyright holders. Then through regulation mandate that all browsers need to include some kind of bit-torrent like functions to increase the reliability of information access as it would be distributed (vs the current centralized points of failure). Fixing copyright law to reflect the Information Age would make the symptoms of the industrial to information conversion sickness (such as DRM) disappear. Compulsary licensing is the key - like what the Library of Congress evolves into in Snow Crash. Derivative works could explode in this kind of environment - imagine the increased revenue to copyright holders as portions of their works are remixed later on (such as Anime Music Videos).
If you could, what would you do to fix copyright?

Google doesn't use paper

[flyingfsck]

The question revolves around the fact that a digital scan of a book, isn't a copy of a book, since it isn't paper. This is similar to taking a photo of a statue, which doesn't infringe copyright of the statue. Same with taking a photo of a painting, it doesn't infringe copyright, since a photo isn't a painting.

Re:Que: Your parents.

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Not very hard to recast it.

1) is tenuous, but you could say that people who really care about the music will buy a legal copy instead of downloading it from some random server, which is likely to have a poorly-digitized version of it.
2) For every song I share, you can already find it on the Internet. If it takes you a couple more seconds of searching, that's irrelevant to the case.
3) Some studies have shown that people are more likely to buy an entire CD or whatever after listening to the song online. The assumption that people would buy CDs if it weren't for these songs is merely "common sense" (supposedly), not anything rigorously justified.

More importantly:

4) I'm not making any profit. I don't care who takes the song from me. I don't notice it. If anything, it uses some of my bandwidth allotment. Google is most definitely hawking Book Search as a service they intend to profit from somehow.

So shouldn't sharing songs be more valid than Book Search?