hutcheson - 12:44 am on Dec 20, 2009 (gmt 0)

By American law, Google's copy/index/show+snippets IS fair use, and therefore IS legal -- multiple judges have ruled that way.

I'm not sure whether the Europeans are ruling differently because of chauvinism (anything American is evil) or fascism (any thought you don't have a permit for is forbidden). In some cases (the French president, simultaneously promoting a three-strikes law for tiny-scale noncommercial copyright violations and being sued for three major large-scale for-profit copyright violations on his own account), both motives seem pretty strongly evinced.

But that's a separate issue.

Part of the problem may be that it's time to move the law from an opt-in model to opt-out for ALL kinds of information distribution: in other words, compulsory licensing, like the old-electronic-media already have (consider radio stations and the pop-music industry.)

And which the web already has, in the robots.txt file.

That works, relatively inexpensively and unobtrusively: unlike the horrific legal expenses sometimes entailed in exercising perfectly legal rights in a world where unethical lawyers are always extorting money by false accusations of infringement. (I'm particularly thinking of the hundreds of millions of dollars consumed in the SCO lawsuits against Linux, or the insanityh of the RIAA cases against people who didn't have any musical interest or even a computer or even a bloody LIFE -- people who'd been DEAD for years!)