SimonWaldman.net

The full Gowers review on intellectual property will probably take a while for me to get through, but a quick skim turns up this gem in a section on Fair usage

Google explain in their response to the call for evidence: “The existence of a general fair use exception that can adapt to new technical environments may explain why the search engines first developed in the USA, where users were able to rely on flexible copyright exceptions, and not in the UK, where such uses would have been considered infringement”.

Oh really? I bet that when they passed this notion around in internal e-mails it was followed by a big ‘;-)‘.

I find it hard to believe they’ve included this quote in the report in all seriousness, without at least the words ‘Chinny Reckon’ in brackets after it.

It’s a nimble bit of debating on Google’s point - but rather defies the sort of empirical logic they have built their business on.

1) If the UK had led the way in all other web development except for search engines, this might have appeared to be the case. I think we know that’s not true.

2) I seem to remember Autonomy launching a consumer facing version of its search engine - it bombed, not for copyright reasons, but because well, there were better ones out there.

Actually - the one case where our law stifles innovation is in the murky world of the liability for community sites for defamation and contempt. But that’s to be discussed another time.

Oh and swapping Silicon Fenn for Silicon Valley might change a few things.