Of Copyright and the Internet

Microsoft and Yahoo join up against Google

Did you know it’s illegal to download copyrighted songs without paying for it? If you’re familiar with the horror stories about the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) going after someone’s grandmother for allegedly doing just that, you already know its probably not a good thing to do. Or that it’s illegal to make copies of music from someone else’s CD or player? The same holds true of copyrighted software and books.

Being an author, it was a bit disconcerting when I first discovered that Google Books had significant parts of System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed available for anyone to look at, when my coauthors and I had had spent many months of effort working on the content. What may seem innocuous (copying a song) takes a different meaning when you yourself have put the effort into creating that song (or book, or software product).

For many people this doesn’t make sense … until you become an author (or composer or developer). An Information Week article the other day caught my eye – Microsoft, Yahoo Unite Against Google Book Search (http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219401064&cid=nl_IW_daily_html). The history of this, briefly, is that Google Books scanned in every book in the world, making pages of content (snippets) available to whoever wanted it. The rationale was that this was allowed under “fair use,” and of course, Google would make money from advertising.

A class action lawsuit followed, with the eventual agreement that Google would pay a percentage of revenues to the copyright owners (authors and publishers) for making portions of books available, and it would be easy to opt out of having your book included online.

Now Microsoft and Yahoo have joined the fray. The main reason appears to be they want to make life difficult to Google. (And not surprisingly, Google is no different when it comes to going after Microsoft.) Purportedly Amazon may get involved as well, as they would stand to lose book sales, since Google intends to sell books associated with the searches.

By the way, in the RIAA’s most recent skirmish against downloading, the jury found for the music companies, awarding them US$675,000 – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_v._Tenenbaum. Whether you’re someone’s grandmother or not, it’s probably not a good idea to try to break copyright laws. Guess that includes Google as well.

• Microsoft
• copyright
• fair use
• Google Books
• Microsoft
• RIAA
• tenenbaum
• Yahoo. Amazon