Understanding the Copyright Wars: Aereo, Google, and GoldieBlox, an article on the Harvard Business Review website, is a recount of recent events in what the press is calling the ‘Copyright Wars.’ The modern world of innovation in technology is surrounded by a haze of court rulings, lawyers and judges, and this article focuses on recent developments on this war zone. Orly Lobel, the author of the article, does her homework and finds Disney to be a large contributor to the war. According to Lobel, Disney has pushed hard in the courts to extend the author’s rights to a copyright. In the past, copyrights were only temporary, however they can now last an entire century. Disney did this to prevent others from using their works when the copyright expired, thus making them more money in licensing and selling the rights to the work in the future. Besides Disney, Google has also been waging a war on copyrights, though from a different side. Lobel explains that Google’s search engine has acquired a new function, Google Books. Using this program, researchers are given a snippet of a book and are able to do a more in-depth search about a book’s topics and intention. This search function is viewed as a form of copyright infringement, because Google has set this up for over 20 million books, but never asked the copyright holder for permission. The courts ruled, however, that this is not a copyright infringement, because it helps researchers find millions of books that they never would have found before. The courts viewed that the benefits of aiding these many publishers and authors outweighed the adverse affects to already large and well known books, authors, and publishers. Lobel uses this information to lead up to a currently unresolved legal battle, ABC, Inc., v. Aereo, Inc. The Supreme Court currently has this case, a nationwide issue that has strong backers on both sides. Aereo streams local T.V. stations over the internet to its members, whom can watch it almost anywhere they want. In addition, the service also comes with cloud-based DVR, where your shows are stored in the cloud and can also be accessed wherever and whenever they are wanted. ABC, Inc. is arguing that this is a...
