17 January 2006

Fair Use

Lawrence Lessig makes a brilliant argument about Google's Book Search service and whether or not it should be considered "fair use" of the works. Naturally some book publishers are threatened and are suing Google over this service. He talks about the mp3.com case in this talk also. It appears that if the book service is deemed to be not "fair use" then Google's entire search engine could be threatened (along with Yahoo, MSN and every other search engine). If it is found to be "fair use" however, I think this will be a huge win for innovation and freedom not to mention cultural history.

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