HUMAN LAW MEDIATION

Ed Miracle instructs UK law firm, Human Law

Further to my recent posts on this matter, I can inform you that the American artist, Ed Miracle has instructed the UK law firm, Human Law to represent him within the UK & the Commonwealth.(excluding Canada)

This follows the copyright infringement of his painting(on the left) "I Told You So."

Human Law have appointed the barrister, Charles Apthorp of 5 Essex Court Chambers, London to advise and represent the client's interests.

 

Could Google be involved in the copyright case of the century?

"The Case of the Century" is a slogan which is normally over-used but a potential litigation involving Google could end up being one of the defining cases of the digital era.

The company, Google barely needs an introduction. It is one of the most significant companies of the New Economy. It is the ubiquitous search engine and an organisation which plans to do a great deal more.

One of these plans is its Google Print Library Project, with the intention to scan all or parts of the book collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University.

Google intends to make those text searchable on Google and then to sell the advertisements online.

The potential clash with others is inevitably over copyright.

Google suspended its plans on 14th August citing concerns over copyright infringement.

Nevertheless developments have moved since.

On Tuesday 20th September, a group representing in excess of 8,000 authors filed a lawsuit against Google alleging the scanning and digitisation of the books was copyright infringement. The group is the Authors Guild.

Having suspended the project, Google has just announced that it will renew scanning and make the service available soon. However, Google emphasised that the print programme would not allow people to view all the contents of the books and that it would focus initially on books that are out of print in order to demonstrate that the projects would not hit sales.

What is interesting is that when you scrutinise this matter more, you see that there is not in fact too much difference betwen the parties.

As Google write in their blog on this issue "At most we show only a brief snippet of text where the search term appears, along with basic bibliogrpahic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries."

 

It is not as clearcut as saying that the whole book will be available online.Indeed as Google point out there is an argument that Google Print could help enhance book sales.

As Google write "Just as Google helps you find sites you might not have found any other way by indexing the full text of web pages, Google Print, like an electronic card catalog, indexes book content to help users find, and perhaps buy, books. This ability to introduce millions of users to millions of titles can only expand the market for authors’ books, which is precisely what copyright law is intended to foster."

Therefore, in fact the main issue here revolves around permission. Google state that they do not require it and to do so would undermine the project. The sheer volume of information would be too vast to get on a case by case basis. 

Publishers and authors assert that scanning a whole book without permission, and storing it indefintely on a server would breach Copyright law. The Authors Guild president, Nick Taylor has written "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied."   

The main significance for Google may be if they lose the case it would hinder their ability to apply the same method of existing media such as film or sound recordings.