Newspaper Industry Lawyers Attack Fair Use, Claim Google Is Illegal; TechDirt, 11/13/09

Mike Masnick, TechDirt; Newspaper Industry Lawyers Attack Fair Use, Claim Google Is Illegal:

"Hmm. So, on Monday Rupert Murdoch suggests that the courts would reject fair use as a concept, and by Friday two newspaper industry lawyers just happen to have an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining how Google violates copyright law by caching the websites it indexes. If the names of the lawyers -- Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown -- sound vaguely familiar, that's because they're the same two lawyers who, six months ago, wrote a laughably ridiculous editorial (that time for the Washington Post) proposing special new copyright laws to save newspapers, while destroying pretty much everything that makes the internet useful. Of course, both the Washington Post and the WSJ conveniently left out the fact that these two lawyers regularly represent newspapers and other media and entertainment firms -- even as that seems rather relevant (what happened to those FTC disclosure laws?). While I do actually agree with the lawyers that it's a shame the focus on the Google Book Search settlement avoided the big fair use question, I think they're entirely wrong to suggest that Google itself violates copyright law."

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091113/1357386926.shtml