Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Google to face copyright lawsuit by visual artists
Yahoo! News: "Google Inc is expected to be sued by photographers, illustrators and other visual artists who claim the company is infringing their rights by scanning and displaying their work without compensation."
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4 comments:
I always wondered why authors would put their books available on google books, I have actually been lucky enough to find one of my textbooks for intro to entrepreneurship on that site. It kind of sucks that Google is getting so screwed since they're kind of being ganged up on by a bunch of small companies who seem to thing google has exploited their copyrights. This reminds me a lot of similar controversies regarding illegal music downloading applications, better for the public and worse for the artists.
This has been an ongoing thing with Google as I remember. They were initially going to scan the entire library of congress, the harvard library, and somewhere else before it got shut down for supposed copyright infringement. My argument is, if you can get these books from a local library for free, why shouldn't you be able to to view them for free on the internet. Don't libraries promote the same time of monetary damages to authors and visual artists as any form of online library? Certainly, it makes things easier to access, but doesn't seem to terrible....
I don't think I totally understand what's going on here. The artists whose work is in someone else's book are suing Google? Why isn't the author of the book suing Google?
In principle, i agree with Jeremy in that books available at the public library should become public domain- why don't authors have a problem with that? I see however that once these books are available online, it will change the writing industry. These authors will no longer be able to earn any money for writing, and the art form will be lost. This is something we must be very very cautious of as the new norms develop in the near future.
Its definitely a fine line between the public and the artist. As much as I think that all the availability of information is helpful. I understand that artist's do need to have control and be paid for their work or artists will not be able to exist. I hope that they are able to work out a system that continues to have the information available without upsetting the artists. unfortunately this will probably mean a cost for the consumer. This is especially bad because google always tries to keep a very "don't be evil" reputation and stealing art would be pretty "evil"
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