More on Googlezon

Some of you might remember that great 8 minute Flash thing I sent around about Googlezon and a projection to 2015.

Here’s an interesting commentary on it.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hilden/20050524.html

And, more importantly, Googlezon doesn’t even have to run afoul of journalistic ethics here: Its fact-stripping robots could easily (and automatically) provide citations to all their sources - each accessible by a link. Thus, rather than being an engine of plagiarism, Googlezon’s fact-stripping bots might be better seen as an engine of compilation.

Making compilations like this illegal, as copyright infringement, would challenge the status of a lot of traditional research - such as virtually any doctoral thesis, nonfiction book, academic paper, and on and on. For this reason, I agree with Sloan and Taylor that the Supreme Court would likely rule for Googlezon - not “old media” - in its Supreme Court case.

But it’s also possible the Court - or, ultimately Congress, in the wake of the Court’s decision - would rework copyright in a way that better fits the Internet.

Copyright is meant, in large part, to protect the market for a given work, and thus to protect incentives to create new works. Yet allowing people to read (for free) a fact-stripping bot’s compilation of news might undermine the market for newspapers and their online outposts. And that may lead newspapers to fight back in Congress for a broader version of copyright that would end, or limit, the reign of fact-stripping bots.

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