Ip in search

The issue might seem easy but the following video from UC Berkeley show interesting issues which can arise when regulations of the past meet new ways of expressing information.

I know, the video is starting to feel a bit old. I find myself thinking that “is that really a problem still”. Because, some of the issues brought up by Jason Schultz in his lecture are settled or best practices has developed over the three years since it was recorded.

The most recent one is the one on Google books project. The Association of American Publishers and Google have settled on how to compensate the alleged copyright infringement of the authors of which books are provided mostly in snippets through the search engine.

The lecture also discusses the difference in trademark infringement between buying a search term on Google and using a trademark in the ad text itself. This is an issue which now has ended up in a quite easy to understand policy. But the problems brought up in the video show the difficulty in applying an old economy thinking on to the new world of information. We see lots of confusion and protective measures, instead of embracing the future which is already here and start to use it.

I will continue to look in to the issue of IP and search engines with the next stop at Google books. Stay tuned.

Johan Örneblad