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The Googlization of Everything
Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
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So what does Google have to do with any of this? Not as much as some would assume. Our lives are full of goods and services that are built to enhance the value of other goods and services. Other goods we buy are generic replacements for parts of other goods, such as lightbulbs, universal remote controls for televisions, or replacement batteries for automobiles. In many of the cases in which Google has been accused of riding for free on the investment of others, Google is in fact just offering a cheaper and more effective replacement for part of the original service. But because of the state-granted monopoly that we call copyright, the role Google plays in the information world is nowhere as simple as the role that cheap lightbulbs play in the electric appliance economy.
Although no court has taken the argument seriously enough to endanger Google’s core business, a growing number of firms have started voicing complaints that Google rides for free on the creative work and investment of others. This argument seems futile for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Google has strong legal grounds (at least within the United States) to do just about everything it does with online content (but not, as I show later, with stuff that resides in the real world). One landmark U.S. case in search-engine law in 2003 set a good precedent that search engines could—in fact must—make copies of others’ work to ensure that the Web functions well for everyone.34 And the American copyright concept of fair use generally protects anyone who wishes to copy and distribute small portions of copyrighted works as long as the purpose of the distribution fulfills some role that enhances the public good, such as education, informing the public about current events or debates, or creating highly transformative work out of the raw materials of existing expressions. So when Google scans someone else’s site, it can feel confident in its practice of excerpting a small slice of descriptive text from the site to help users decide whether it is relevant to their search.35
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