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With No Fair Use, It's More Difficult to Innovate, Says Google (torrentfreak.com) 65

Posted by msmash from the things-we-all-need dept.
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.
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With No Fair Use, It's More Difficult to Innovate, Says Google More

With No Fair Use, It's More Difficult to Innovate, Says Google

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  • O RLY? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Friday February 24, 2017 @01:07PM (#53924309)

    "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: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      And your point would be?

      • Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Friday February 24, 2017 @01:42PM (#53924489)

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

        • Google can define innovation anyway it wants to. It would seem that they have a rather successful business indexing "other peoples ideas" and making them available for search. I'd call that innovation.

          • Re:You do not get to define innovation for anyone (Score:5, Informative)

            by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Friday February 24, 2017 @03:03PM (#53925003)

            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: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Google's innovation was making a search so good people wanted to use it despite the ads. I think you forget the sorry state of search engines before they came along...

              • 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 i

                • When Google first launched their search engine, they didn't have ads

                  What, for about 18 months? It was nice back then, but honestly between 1996 and 1999 search was comically bad. Google's innovation was making search /work/.

                  I'm not even sure what other people's work you might be talking about... news? Big old bag of "meh" for you there. Not that I search for news on Google, but if I did I wouldn't be reading it there and if the site I click through to can't work out how to make people pay for advertising that would be their problem, not Google's.

                  I dunno, maybe you could foc

      • They are an abuser of the fair use clauses rather than an example of how it should work

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      If the article was about Google wanting to make information more proprietary and secret, you'd bitch about that too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        This is actually an article about Google looking to make a big investment push into Australia, very interesting' I wonder how big an investment it will be. Far more attractive location to bring coders from all over the world and at a lower price due to quality of life benefits. Very interesting in deed.

    • Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday February 24, 2017 @01:48PM (#53924529)
      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.

      • 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 f

    • This is a very narrow and shortsighted outlook. No one person or company can innovate infinitely. Take, for instance, the novel Dracula.. one author could never have done all the adaptations, revamps, plays, movies, games, etc. that has grown over that one concept, and Stoker didn't even invent vampires, he borrowed them from folk lore.

      America's founders knew that ideas and innovations belonged to the public not locked up behind laws, that's why we have limited copyrights, so that eventually works will g

      • America's founders knew that ideas and innovations belonged to the public not locked up behind laws, that's why we have limited copyrights, so that eventually works will go into the public domain to spark new ideas.

        Somehow I doubt the founding fathers had industrial scale barratry and copyright lasting longer than any human lifetime in mind, nor on the other hand that large businesses should be able to make staggering profits by exploiting the works of others in almost textbook examples of what copyright was meant to prevent and get away with it because of fair use or safe harbour provisions.

      • It's hilarious you think you have limited copyrights. Your copyright durations are limited in name only.

        • It's hilarious you have no reading comprehension, because I said "America's founders", who originally made copyright last 14 years with an option for 14 more.

    • "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.

      • Given that vastly more work is created and that work is distributed to vastly more people under copyright-supported activities than via any other economic model in human history, I think your "making it less efficient" claim needs some supporting evidence.

        The point of copyright is to create an effective market where the same sorts of effects that motivate making more and better physical products also motivate making more and better creative works.

        • 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

          • 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 u

            • 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 histo

    • One can only wonder what the inventors of Fire, Farming, and the Wheele could have done had their inventions were treated then as they could be treated now. Oh wait, I just gave a dumb ass argument.

      • Oh wait, I just gave a dumb ass argument.

        Well, since none of the things you mentioned would have had anything to do with copyright, yes, you did.

  • Unfair Use Search (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Search without fair use. Would it show only links to the content? Perhaps the UI could ask for a set of words defining the search context and give a numerical measurement along the result links to short for relevancy if requested.

  • The cloud isn't safe... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Friday February 24, 2017 @01:18PM (#53924361)
    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.

  • In a related news, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Yenya ( 12004 ) on Friday February 24, 2017 @01:28PM (#53924401) Homepage Journal

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

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

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

  • almost funny, coming from the owners of Youtube (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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.

  • So why was it in favor of TPP? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It eliminated fair use worldwide.

  • News at 1716!

  • google admits the more patents and copyright you have the more restrictive business and innovation got. you couldn't create products, or innovate yourself.

    here's the truth. the further you kill copyright/patents, the easier it gets to innovate, and do business yourself. rather than be reliant on copyright/patents to be a monopoly on content, you must invest your money continuously and fast, in order to have the best products and technology on the market, otherwise someone will outdo you and put your busines

  • Look back in history, you will see that the patents on the steam engine halted innovation in that space for 20 years. And the irony is that two separate patents on different parts of the steam engine owned by different people prevented them from continuing to evolve them due to them being necessary tech for the running and future of the steam engine. Once these two patents ran out and people could combine them the steam engine became economically feasable for everyday use. before that only rich corporation

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