LBi London

Google to be exempt from copyright law?

Posted by Simon Howland January 22nd, 2010

Lord Lucas’ proposed amendments to the Digital economy Bill would see search engines granted a license to copy and re-publish content legally without risk of litigation.

An amendment proposed by Lord Lucas to the UK Digital Economy Bill, the brainchild of Lord Mandelson currently going through the British legislative process, seeks to grant search engines including Google the right to a “standing and non-exclusive license [...] to make a copy of some or all of the content” of any website not presenting a “machine-readable file”. We assume the “machine readable file” to be a reference to the industry standard ‘robots.txt’ file, specified by the robots exclusion protocol.

This is in the face of recent comments made by publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch, whom as Forbes.com reported in November “wants a Google rebellion” and alludes to the suggestion that the re-publication of content within search results amounts to theft. Venture Beat highlighted a Sky News video that makes interesting viewing in which Murdoch elaborates on his views.

The amendment has been proposed in order to ensure that search engines can continue to operate and innovate in British territories free from the threat of legal action from copyright owners over content copied by search engines in the course of their operations.

Suing search engines for copyright theft is unlikely to benefit anyone in the long term. It could potentially cause a great deal of grief if anyone were to actually be successful in seeking damages from search engines for copyright theft. News aggregation services and journalists may fall foul of this too, as they also republish snippets and quote news from online sources.

Given that the proposed amendments include a method to legally prevent the use of copyright material at the owner’s discretion, it is my opinion that this is a positive proposal, as it reflects, upholds and protects current accepted practices in a reasonable and workable manner.

Tags: copyright, Google

2 comments Share

A war on files

Posted by Chris Clarke October 28th, 2009

I’ve just got back from C&binet forum, a government organised conference bringing the creative industries together to discuss the challenges and opportunities outlined in this year’s Digital Britain report. It was by and large a worthwhile event, and as always much of the value was in meeting talented people from all corners of the creative industry. On the downside, the debate in the main hall focussed way too much on ways of preserving outdated business models in the face of web enabled copyright infringement and not enough on ideas and business models which exploit the new realities.

Lord Mandelson announced this morning after keeping us waiting for a suitably rock n roll period of time that the government’s bright idea to combat file sharing is to send letters on a three strikes basis. What then happens isn’t clear, but I can’t help feeling it won’t work. Clearly the government has to be seen to do something, but I can’t help feeling this will drive the behaviour underground via encryption. Yesterday I asked Sion Simon if the government has an appetite for a war on files alongside the clearly very effective one raging on drugs. It seems they have.  To be fair the announcement did hint at help for businesses offering credible alternatives to illegal downloads, but in true New Labour style there didn’t seem to be any clarity over what that will be.  More positive was a commitment to fixing the UK’s arcane copyright laws, making it easier for artists to clear rights for the production of new work. As David Lammy said yesterday in his well informed speech, quoting Picasso; “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” So we look forward to the possibility of legislation which will enable a legitimate future for sampling, mashups and other digitally driven forms of creativity.

Tags: c&binet, copyright, government, UK, web

1 comments Share