The Googlization of Everything

Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog has a nice summary of some of the rich commentary this week about Google and Google Book Search.

In the post, he writes:

(Picky criticism to go along with the praise for Siva: if one of your main arguments is that Google is "fragrantly violating copyright," it's probably not a good idea to do the same thing on your blog by frequently reproducing copyrighted articles.)

So I thought I would briefly outline why what we do on blogs and Web sites is different from what Google is doing to copyrighted books:

Hey, thanks for the props.

To explain my full-text postings: For a variety of reasons that would take too long to explain in comments, posting of entire Web-based articles about which one is commenting on a not-for-profit Web site is almost never an infringement. And posting them on a for-profit site is rarely and infringement.

The reason is the "self-help" or "notice-and-takedown" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This and the landmark case Kelly v. ArribaSoft made clear that different copyright norms exist for the Web world and the real world.

That said, Google has built its entire Web search empire on the act of copying Web sites into its index in total, without permission, without compensation. And that's good.

But in Book Search, Google is reaching into the real world and forcing it to comply with the norms of the Web world. And that's not necessarily good. Or, at least, it's likely to cause more trouble than it solves because courts will recoil.

This is all in the context of Hollywood and Microsoft trying to undermine the "notice-and-takedown" provisions of the DMCA.

As I said. Long story.

For more on this, please read my article, The Googlization of Everything and the Future of Copyright from the UC Davis Law Review.