Is Google Print the beginning of the Copyright Revolution?

About a year ago, I had shared my thoughts with a group of diverse professionals at the poolside of the conference hotel, my wild crystal ball predictions I had about the future of copyright.

Ever since I begun my research of tech law, copyright has been challenged from all angles. It’s obvious even to a layman that of all the laws dealing with property, the one that has the most difficulty being kept as protectable property is Copyright.

I used a dramatic description - the French Revolution - for what I see may happen to copyright. As in the French Revolution where the common people rose up against the rich and royalty - the content poor of today could rise up against the content rich. Not just because they are content rich but because they had exploited the content poor for too long.

Content owners will continue to push the boundaries of their claimed rights and Prof Lawrence Lessig has an anecdote to illustrate (taken from his blog):

"Property law since time immemorial had held that your land reached from the ground to the heavens. Then airplanes were invented — a technology oblivious to this ancient law. A couple of farmers sued to enforce their ancient rights — insisting airplanes can’t fly over land without their permission. And thus the Supreme Court had to decide whether this ancient law — much older than the law of copyright — should prevail over this new technology. The Supreme Court’s answer was perfectly clear: Absolutely not. “Common sense revolts at the idea,” Justice Douglas wrote. And with that sentence, hundreds of years of property law was gone, and the world was a much wealthier place."

So, it would appear that Copyright needs to be adapted to the challenges of modern technology or face being made irrelevant or worse, a revolution from the content poor.

Has the content poor of the world today reached that point for a cyber revolution of the law of copyright? Well, some of today's events seem to point that way. For example, the growing number of users downloading MP3 music despite the retaliation by content owners in the US prosecuting hundreds from a cross section of society. This is being replicated all over the world. Oddly enough, despite the widespread knowledge that downloading copyrighted music, millions continue to do it regardless.

Now with the giant Google is challenging book authors and publishers’ rights of copyright by digitising books found in several university libraries (see previous post here), is this the beginning of the cyber copyright revolution or the adaptation of it to new technology?

Watch this space for updates on the Google Print suit.