Copyright: Microsoft shot at Google justified or just garbage?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 07 March 2007 18:44

Opinion and Analysis

Has Google has opened new doors for content providers that the elite content distributors have held tightly shut in the past, or is Google engaging in wholesale copyright infringement?

A massive brouhaha has erupted following Microsoft head attorney Thomas Rubin's comments in a speech to the Association of American Publishers accusing Google of a ‘cavalier approach to copyright’ – be it in selling AdWords for pirated content, scanning the books of others, taking news headlines and categorizing them in Google News or through the delivery of video content via Youtube.

Of course Microsoft has itself copied plenty of ideas in the past, and championed the idea of ‘embrace and extend’. Windows has always been seen as a copy of Apple’s Mac OS, which itself took ideas from Xerox’s groundbreaking work in developing a graphical user interface.

Microsoft and Apple settled on that issue years ago, but Microsoft wasn’t the first company to develop an operating system, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a web browser or plenty of other things. What Microsoft has been good at doing is taking people’s ideas and making them better, or if not better, making them more attractive to consumers – and hence, Microsoft is the world’s No.1 software company.

But allegations of copyright infringement are, in this case, different. Here, Google is not accused of copying ideas and developing their own product. Google is being accused of taking other people’s copyright works and using them to sell advertising around, although this isn’t always the case.

With Google’s Book Search projects, Google has done deals with a range of the world’s top libraries to take their entire collections, scan them, and make them searchable, letting people get snippets of the contents of books, so they can then buy the book from traditional or online book stores, or go to the library where they can borrow or read the book free of charge.

Books that are out of copyright can be reproduced online in whole – they are out of copyright after all, and no-one can stop you from taking that work and republishing it in print or on your website.

Google originally decided to scan as many of the world’s books without the consent of publishing houses, but after an initial outcry Google has instituted a program to allow copyright holders to give explicit permission for Google to scan their works.

So, what has Microsoft done to differentiate themselves from Google? And isn't this all just a jealous attack on Google, who is having success in attacking Microsoft on several fronts? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion...