Google Shouldn't Punt on Litigation

K. Matthew Dames has an opinion piece in his new blog on Google's litigation woes. Dames starts out the post with this:

Here's what I fear will happen in the Google Print Library Project: the copyright controversies will never go to trial, and instead will be resolved by the parties in a confidential settlement agreement.

Later he writes:

Still, a confidential settlement would do nothing to resolve critical legal issues that arise in digitization projects, most notably those of fair use in the digital age. Perhaps more than anything else, at issue in the Google Library Print Project is the extent to which fair use applies in an era of digitized work.

He's right that what needs to come out of this is a clearer definition of what can and cannot be done. We don't need another litigation like American Geophysical Union v. Texaco that fell short of giving us the clarification of Fair Use in the for-profit section that we needed.

By the way, Dames has been creating new blogs out of SNTreport.com. This one will focus just on copyright issues.

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