There is a sad sort of phenomenon that the world populace has been subjected to for most of this era, and it is becoming increasingly prominent and obvious. The root of this problem is businesses inability to evolve at the same pace as technology. A new product or technology arises and becomes popular and instead of embracing this new way idea to increase business the corporations’ first strategy is litigation. It is always litigation.

The record industry was terrible about this during the Napster era, and has only in the last few years started to really embrace this new technology. The movie studio’s are now attacking Google Video and YouTube. Warner aside, these people don’t see the benefit of these sites. For almost any sort of market, exposure only increases your sales. This has been proven quite adequately with mp3s, and I can’t imagine it not applying just the same with video.

Lately people have been ridiculing and litigating Google for everything they are doing, because they are making money. They are well within fair-use laws. Their news site only shows a short clip from the author’s site which the reader must go to in order to read the full article. The book search that they have created works similarly, a small excerpt is shown with a reference to the full work, this is the same rights that someone writing a paper would get, why is it not applicable to Google? Because they are displaying ads? They are not SELLING the book, nor the excerpt. Why should they have to share their ad revenue?

People complain that their copyrights to their content are being infringed, when in reality they should be thanking Google for the added exposure. They should try to harness this new exposure and maximize their profits from it. Litigating new technology only stifles innovation. Google is giving consumers exactly what they want, an easier way to find and absorb content. If the content providers/producers were making this as easy as Google is, then THEY would be making the money and even still they are only GAINING from Google’s distribution of their content because it always points back to the source.

This really comes down to people being angry about not getting money. Even if the money being made is not directly coming from their content, but only indirectly associated with it. As I understand it, Google has an opt out mechanism for excluding content from their search products. If these people don’t want their content - which is FREELY viewable - to be redistributed then they can simply exclude themselves, but that is not what they want. They WANT to be included, but the want a share of the revenue to which they have no right. Shameful, simply shameful.