Recent lawsuits have led Silicon Valley to question whether Google has renounced its role of copyright crusader in favour of its business interests, writes Ben Hallman
It is a curiosity of the digital age that Google, which went public just five years ago, is already one of the grand old lions of the digital economy. In its short existence, the company has not only come to dominate the search engine marketplace, but has also aggressively sought to broaden the scope of fair use under copyright law in a way that benefits other internet technology companies as well. “Google is carrying a lot of water for the tech community,” says James Grimmelmann, an intellectual property professor at New York Law School. “People are rooting for them to wage the fair use fight.”
