"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." See Google's corporate page.
If the world's information is truly ever universally accessible and useful, many parties stand to lose out. For instance:
- Copyright owners - If copyrighted works are universally accessible and useful, what is the role of copyright?
- Those concerned about secrets and privacy - if certain subsets of "the world's information" are better left private, how will Google take this into account?
- Trademark owners - If the some information is best described with the use of trademarks, how do trademark rights figure in?
Google's wide array of services raise many different and interesting legal issues, some of which are beginning to come up in courts.
This project looks at Google's services one at a time and notes, analyzes, and discusses policy issues surrounding each.
Please click on a link on one of the links to the left to browse through the issues we've covered.
What we do not cover in this project are what we will call "ordinary" legal issues that Google faces that are not really related to how Google functions as a search engine. For instance, Google recently was accused of copyright infringement for a tribute image to artist Joan Miro after it put the following image on its main search page:
.
Whether this is copyright infringement at all, and if it might be, whether it is a fair use, are both interesting questions, and exemplify the types of issues this project is not meant to cover.
Last substantive edit 3/20/2006. Last changed 4/24/2006. Created for cyberspace law course taught by Professor Gasaway at UNC School of Law.
Created by John Sieman & Jamie Newton