It seems like just about everyone is out to get Google. I wrote my midterm paper about a copyright infringement case against Google by a pornographic website, Perfect 10, which claimed that Google directed users to third party websites that contained their copyrighted images. Next up, it was publishing companies and authors around the world who claimed that Google infringed their rights by scanning their books into the Google system without permission. Now, and seemingly not the last such case, the artists who contributed their illustrations to those scanned books are taking a stab at Google.

I can’t help but think that everyone who feels like they are entitled to is jumping on the bandwagon against Google. I am not Google’s lawyer by any means, but as an avid user of the platform, I see more benefit than harm in the overall actions. This is by no means an attempt to take away from or invalidate the above claims that copyrights were infringed, however, are these companies or groups of people oblivious to the fact that this is the direction our society is going in? Everything is becoming digital, and although my eyes may hurt to stare at a computer screen all day versus reading from a book, I too cannot change the shift we are embarking on. We need to embrace these changes, even though they are leading us into new territory, a world that is becoming increasingly digital. Google has certainly helped facilitate this shift, and it has changed the way we as users of the Internet go about our daily activities. Part of embracing the change is adjusting copyright laws to include innovations such as scanned texts and the images that come along with them.

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