Google’s VP of content partnerships, David Eun, posted a lengthy statement on the company’s “approach to content” earlier this week — apparently retaliating against the recent Belgian newspapers/Google News ruling, concern about Google books expansion and the rest.
He states: “Because we don’t own this content, over the years we’ve come up with three primary principles to ensure that we respect content owners and protect their rights: We respect copyright; we let owners choose whether we index their content in our products; and we try to bring benefit back to content owners by partnering with them.” He says that copyright rules encourage use of content in limited ways, as in Google News and Google Books, to help publicize work: “That’s why newspapers are allowed to include short quotations from in-copyright books in their reviews. That’s also why search engines can show snippets (small excerpts) of text in their results.” Touch
This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.
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