Thursday, April 30, 2020

Lawyer Richard C. Owens is a senior Munk fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Law. In an op-ed published April 28 in the National Post, he writes why Google should compensate the media for content provided in its news service.

"Newspaper articles are protected by copyright, but copyright is finicky. It does not apply to information at all. It does apply to original, creative expression, but there isn’t much of that in most news reports, which unambiguously report facts. And to violate copyright, a “material” amount of a story must be copied. Copyright is also eroding, especially online, as evidenced by the fact that Google has won cases that allow it to copy and post whole books and entire images for free."

Read the full op-ed in the National Post