Legal Research

The Buggy Whip Manufacturers’ Lynch Mob Is Forming [UPDATED]

… And it looks like they’ll head straight for Henry Ford’s house Google.

Huh?

Here’s a collection of recent articles by outraged folks from what could be termed “buggy whip” industries — those whose business models have been destroyed by new technologies. They could simply accept the inevitable. They could blame the Internet. But they have chosen to make Google the symbol for their bad fortune:

• Rupert Murdoch asks, “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” (But if we can just sit down at the table together, and you open your checkbook, I can be reasonable.)

• Henry Porter, writing in The Observer, calls Google “an amoral menace” that needs to be “taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.” (While he’s at it, he also gives props to the group of people who barred a Google street view car from the village of Broughton.)

• A group of UK musicians published an open letter in The Times calling for Google to “reinstate music [videos] on YouTube [that were blocked due to copyright issues] and pay a fair price for it.”

(My mum-in-law’s due to arrive here on Wednesday. Hope she’s not as cranky as the rest of the country seems to be.)

• And last, but not least, critics of the Google Books-Authors Guild settlement claim that Google will have exclusive rights to orphan books — out-of-print titles that have been abandoned by authors and publishers alike. (Like how many people would have had access to those texts anyway had Google not digitized them?)

Anybody else? Don’t get left behind. Hurry up and remember to take your pitchforks and torches with you.

UPDATE, 3:25 pm - The AP, huffing and puffing, has caught up with the mob: “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories [translation: fair use].”

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).