Google cares about copyright protections. Well, that's the message it wants to get out to newspaper publishers, anyway.
In a Q&A with a Toronto Star reporter, Google News content specialist Josh Cohen swore up and down that Google plays fair with new content.
"We definitely respect copyright law. What we do is consistent with it.
We always felt that way. When we use more than a fair use of a headline or a snippet, we will license that content. With Google Finance we have licensing deals there, with Local or with Maps we license content. But again, we certainly respect copyright law and what we do is consistent with it," Cohen told the Star.
Still, we know of a few writers who might beg to differ -- the Author's Guild has been suing Google for the past three years copyright infringement. Google's book-scanning initiative (Google Book Search) is at the center of the lawsuit. The Author's Guild argues that the book-scanning effort helps drive traffic and generate revenue for Google, while it infringes copyrights, hurts writers' income potential and depreciates the value of their work.
