With No Fair Use, It's More Difficult to Innovate, Says Google (torrentfreak.com)

Unlike the United States where 'fair use' exemptions are entrenched in law, Australia has only a limited "fair dealing" arrangement. This led head of copyright at Google to conclude that Australia wouldn't be a safe place for his company to store certain data, a clear hindrance to innovation and productivity. From a report on TorrentFreak: The legal freedom offered by fair use is a cornerstone of criticism, research, teaching and news reporting, one that enables the activities of thousands of good causes and enriches the minds of millions. However, not all countries fully embrace the concept. Perhaps surprisingly, Australia is currently behind the times on this front, a point not lost on Google's Senior Copyright Counsel, William Patry. Speaking with The Australian, Patry describes local copyright law as both arcane and not fit for purpose, while acting as a hindrance to innovation and productivity. "We think Australians are just as innovative as Americans, but the laws are different. And those laws dictate that commercially we act in a different way," Patry told the publication. "Our search function, which is the basis of the entire company, is authorized in the US by fair use. You don't have anything like that here." Australia currently employs a more restrictive "fair dealing" approach, but itâ(TM)s certainly possible that fair use could be introduced in the near future.

Comments

O RLY?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

"With no fair use, it's more difficult to make staggering amounts of money from other people's work," says organisation famous for making staggering amounts of money mostly because of other people's work.

Re:O RLY?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Maybe "innovation" isn't really Google's main motivation when making these comments.

Re:O RLY?

[Solandri]

The key point is that they are successful because their services help people make (or save) staggering amounts of money - more than Google makes. That is how the economy becomes more efficient and standard of living improves. Someone comes up with an idea which helps people make more money (increase productivity) or save on costs, and sells it for a cut of the productivity increase or cost savings.

If you break this positive feedback cycle, you tank the economy. Which is Google's point - lack of fair use would prevent them from offering these services to Australia. And the only reason Australia is able to partake in the improved standard of living resulting from services like Google is because they're able to place the servers in other countries.

Re:O RLY?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You do realise that the US is far more liberal with its fair use provisions than almost anywhere else in the world? And that this has been a frequent source of debate in both the creative industries and among international diplomats, since it's questionable whether the US is actually complying with its own treaty obligations while at the same time trying to push ever longer copyright durations and more restrictive practices in other areas onto others?

Ultimately, Google makes the vast majority of its money from advertising, and that advertising is attached in one way or another to content whose value was entirely generated by others, whether we're talking about the main search engine, YouTube, or almost any of Google's other major services.

This is not to say that their services can't be useful, but the idea that innovation is some terrible challenge if you can't exploit all the content that others create to the n-th degree is just silly. As a counterpoint to your arguments about tanking the economy, I give you China, where copyright enforcement is essentially non-existent and (by Western standards) so are the professional creative industries. The primary innovation in content creation in China is arguably their skill at copying the work of others without having to contribute anything back in return.

Re:O RLY?

[MightyYar]

"With no fair use, it's more difficult to make staggering amounts of money from other people's work,"

Or alternately, "Government-granted monopolies distort market, making it less efficient". Big shock.

Re:O RLY?

[rhazz]

The primary innovation in content creation in China is arguably their skill at copying the work of others without having to contribute anything back in return.

If that is true, then it seems to work pretty good.

Re:O RLY?

[MightyYar]

I understand what copyright is intended to do, but I see little evidence that a 90+ year term and other onerous terms are means to this goal. Patents give us a good example of actual stuff being created with 1/4 the term - it's hard to imagine that artists would significantly change their motivation given a 15, 50, or 90 year window. It's very hard to argue that a law which prevents you from building upon another creative work for an entire human lifetime is advancing the useful arts. Rather, it seems like an abuse of government power by an elite.

And of course, as Google points out, the search index could not have occurred under such a regime. I shouldn't have to sell you on the usefulness of internet search on society vs the promise of more Rihanna songs or Transformer movies.

Re:O RLY?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I understand what copyright is intended to do, but I see little evidence that a 90+ year term and other onerous terms are means to this goal.

I'd be the first to agree that the current implementation of copyright is deeply flawed in several ways, including the steady creep up to the current absurd durations you mentioned. I am in no way supporting that side of the copyright system, as you can tell by many other posts I've made including to this very discussion.

However, most use of copyrighted work both by creators and by pirates still happens in the first few years, and in practice shortening the duration to something much more reasonable seems unlikely to affect the behaviour of either side very much. The basic principle is still that copyright establishes similar market incentives to create information-based products to the incentives established by respecting physical private property when it comes to creating physical products.

And of course, as Google points out, the search index could not have occurred under such a regime. I shouldn't have to sell you on the usefulness of internet search on society[...]

I'm something of a skeptic in that regard. My personal suspicion is that if we didn't have the likes of Google indexing everything, we'd just have evolved some other sort of directory/index system, along with including more explicit links in our Web content and probably making more use of bookmarks for starting points relevant to our personal interests. There were already plenty of moves in these directions in parallel with early search engine development, some much more promising than others, and the natural connectedness of the Web would lend itself just fine to scaling up these sorts of alternatives.

Maybe that would even have become a better system than what we have today. By its nature, an automated search engine will always be vulnerable to gaming whatever system it implements. Today's arrangement also locates an awful lot of power centrally with the big search engines, even though they are ultimately only useful because of any good content created by others that they help a visitor to find. When sites that would be of interest to visitors can rise and fall almost entirely by a change in the ranking algorithm at a search engine, over which the site has no control and for which the search engine has no accountability, I'm not sure everything is really working as wonderfully as we sometimes assume.

Automation has so far proven to be a questionable benefit over curation, and while it's certainly true that today's search engines are often better for finding interesting or useful information than the portals and web rings of the 1990s, that's not really a fair comparison. It's called web browsing for a reason, and I truly think we've lost something that had great potential there with the rise of the search engines.

Re:O RLY?

[MightyYar]

I'm something of a skeptic in that regard.

Fair enough, though it seems notable to me that all of the search engines arose in places with looser copyright than Australia.

Maybe that would even have become a better system than what we have today.

Now it's my turn to be skeptical :)

You are basically arguing that a technology might be better today if only there was a major roadblock which forbade the current approach, forcing us to explore alternatives. The problem I have with that argument is that there is nothing stopping someone from implementing those alternatives right now, and despite at least two periods in recent history where massive capital was thrown at anything even remotely web-related, no such solution arose. It's certainly not ideal to have Google running the search world, but I'm highly skeptical that simply banning their method would make us any better off.

Automation has so far proven to be a questionable benefit over curation,

I think Wikipedia demonstrates the scale limits of openly curated content. It's awesome, but orders of magnitude smaller than Google's index. If we are talking proprietary curated content, you could probably go larger if you were Google, but I question the value of putting a huge advertising company in charge of a manually compiled index. I remember the bad old pre-Google days of search where all the content was mixed in with sponsored results.

The cloud isn't safe...

[__aaclcg7560]

The only safe place for your data is a file server and offsite backups that you control. I no longer use the cloud to store my data.

Re: The cloud isn't safe...

[__aaclcg7560]

Nice try Grandpa, you are getting phased out.

Young people today. No respect for sound security practices. Now get off my lawn!

In a related news,

[Yenya]

In a related news, Alphabet wants to protect its data as much as possible:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

It is quite interesting to see these two stories in the front page near each other.

almost funny, coming from the owners of Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the number of times we've seen fair use material, on youtube, stricken down or monetized based on fraudulent copyright or DMCA claims; I find this article hilarious.

Re:You do not get to define innovation for anyone

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But Google's major innovation wasn't inventing the search engine, it was monetizing their services by finding ways to attach advertising to the work of others.

If that's how they want to define innovation, then I'm OK if they find it difficult to do more of it.

Re:You do not get to define innovation for anyone

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

When Google first launched their search engine, they didn't have ads in the way they and many other free-to-use online services do today. They were one of the pioneers of the modern online world where everything is expected to be "free", privacy is invaded routinely, advertising of questionable value to almost everyone other than the ad networks dominates, and web pages are so full of tracking and advertising junk that an entire ecosystem of tools had to be invented just to make the web not suck more than it did 20 years ago. Whatever benefits any of Google's services might have offered relative to the alternatives we had before, I'm still not sure it was worth the trade-off.