Words aren't property Mrs Google Print critic

Bill Herman is irritated at a journalist's misunderstanding of copyright and Google's fair use rights.

"Blogging a dead horse

I know I already complained about her article, but Susan Cheever's misunderstanding of copyright law is just driving me batty.

She literally maps the entirety of property law onto copyright law and uses this half-suited metaphor to guide her highly moralistic judgements. In a December 12 Newsday piece entitled "Just Google 'thou shalt not steal,'" she makes copyright claims that would make even Jack Valenti blush. (Okay, so that's a metaphor, too. BUSTED.)

To wit:

Words are property. This principle has been upheld by the law since 1710, when the first copyright law was passed.

Actually, Ms. Cheever, you're talking about the Statute of Anne, which (according to the text of the Act and every generation of British Parliament since its passage) says no such thing. Quite the contrary. British publishers even arranged a collusive lawsuit to try to apply common law principles of property to copyright in books, which failed. When a real lawsuit came out as the publishers wanted (Millar v. Taylor, 1769), that principle actually did make it onto the law books--for five whole years. It was overturned by Donaldson v. Becket in 1774, and the Donaldson precedent--that the copyright monopoly is not subject to the common law rules of tangible property--has stood ever since (Vaidhyanathan, 2001, pp. 42-43)...

One more:

Google doesn't like the copyright laws as they have existed for centuries.

This is a profound inversion of who's really changing the rules around here. At the behest of the copyright industries, we've gone from something resembling a coherent (if still not public-interest-minded) copyright law to what most commentators describe as a system of insane, overreaching, incomprehensible, First-Amendment-squashing copyright law...

In 1997, the exclusive right of publication wasn't enough for the copyright industries; they wanted to take away my freedom to tinker as well. It is now illegal to make a backup copy of my 5-year-old niece's favorite DVD. That's even though copying a software install CD for the exact same reason is 110% legal. Backup DVD? Illegal. Backup software? Legal. Making a new software key for legally purchased software? Illegal. Make sense to you? Me neither."

[Btw Ignore the comment at the bottom of the post - it's just spam]