The Googlization of Everything and the Future of Copyright

Although I'm not an intellectual property attorney, I still can attest that the laws governing it in the United States are fundamentally flawed. They no longer serve the purpose intended, to encourage innovation and creativity. Essentially, the laws were put in bridge the incentive dilemma that present in copyrighted work. These shelters ensures a market will exist for the art. This is often forgotten.

This article goes into depth the legal conflicts that Google's efforts to build a digitize libraries. It is of my opinion that most of the points made in this article are moot because it describes problem in an outdated system. The only way to properly deal with the problem of copyright issues.

The problem is that if we don't someone else will. We have the potential something that no other civilization has ever accomplished before. For a small investment we can digitize every book that ever existed. The law should allow this. The law should also accomodate a reasonable means to ensure artist have an incentive to produce. And this dosen't mean that a work is almost forever protected. Not everything retains value. In fact, most things lose value, but some also gain. The same rules should apply to art. Further, and most importantly, it must be acknowledged that not all countries share the same intellectual property laws. It's inevitable that information will find it's way to those countries with more porous intellectual restrictions.

When it's all said and done, we will all sit back here and wondered where we went wrong. We will try to understand why we didn't just put in law that were more compatible of the times. Instead we just tried to interpret this mess in the courts, which never works. And all the meanwhile Congress just makes things worse by adding more antiquated amendments to the law. so in essence, we are on the road to failure without any chance of getting off.

The question that needs to be discussed is whether if the potential for these new capabilities will eventually influence copyright law in the right direction?

Siva Vaidhyanathan (2005) The Googlization of Everything and the Future of Copyright