Winning

Yesterday, a court in New York may have saved the last shred of copyright law by rightfully defeating Google's attempt to claim ownership for millions of books by essentially putting the burden of proving copyright on the copyright holders.

Though there were some good intentions in what Google was attempting to do, there was always an eye on profit. And I know everybody wants everything to be free these days, but we can't live in a capitalist society and not have copyright law. Some of us have to survive on our intellectual property and asking us to surrender it to Google because of they say so, just doesn't sit right with me.

The issue is quite complicated and I won't attempt to summarize it. I'll leave that to the experts. Here's an article from The Guardian explaining the decision (article). This is a victory not only for authors, but for all of us. We can't allow corporations to simply bypass the law to create systems that are more beneficial for them alone.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony that I'm posting this with Google's free blog service.