As technology expands, the old intellectual property debate rages on. Photographers and illustrators filed a lawsuit against Google in April, claiming that the search engine displays copyrighted images in books it scans, without fairly compensating the creators. The Google Books feature allows users to read books and magazines that Google has scanned and are stored in a large database. If the book is out of copyright, or the owner has given permission, the pages can be viewed by users. Books in the public domain can be fully viewed and downloaded for print. Google claims that it is up complying with all of its copyright law.
The music industry has already seen a similar problem with possible copyright infringement, proper artist compensation etc, with file share entities like Napster, and the thousands of other file shares where users don't pay for music. The artist Prince had websites shutdown fan pages and videos that featured people singing his songs or had footage (via camera phones etc) of him performing. With the internet being such a wide resource, will intellectual property and copyright laws have to be completely re written, or will artists just have to live with knowing they may be missing out on some revenue?
This also made me think about the whole "digital book" concept, a la Kindle, etc. Is having a book on line taking away from the experience of reading. There is something to be said about just picking up a book and turning the pages. Do we really want to find all of our literature on line?
Artists vs. Google Here
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