Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Google and copyright claims

You know, I'm thinking that Google should be getting a bit more hard-nosed about copyright. When someone sues them claiming that Google can't internally cache anything without permission, Google should simply shrug and immediately blacklist everything by the plaintiff. From that point on, nothing belonging to the plaintiff will appear anywhere in any of Google's services. You don't want Google to maintain even neccesary internal copies of your stuff? Fine, Google won't and you'll live with the consequences.

Note that this is different from distributing copies of your work. Google can't hand out copies of your book. But returning a sentence or two in response to a search query and pointing to where the book can be bought? That's just as fine as a person mentioning something interesting from a book and telling their friend where to buy it. An author doesn't like that, that author gets to live with nobody recommending their books to friends too.