Recently, Thomas Rubin, Microsoft’s associate general counsel, addressed the Association of American Publishers’annual meeting in New York and argued in his speech that Microsoft’s Live Search Books honors copyright protection and fair use whereas Google’s Book Search abuses it. He said that “Google has chosen the wrong path for the longer term, because it systematically violates copyright and deprives authors and publishers of an important avenue for monetizing their works. […] Google has also undertaken this path without any attempt to reach an agreement with affected publishers and authors before engaging in copying“. Indeed, Google’s book’s policy is one of the main chink in Google’s armor and Microsoft envisages to capitalize on it.

Two different approaches

Google’s concept is to index the World’s libraries and to offer entire books or sometimes just snippets to the public. As books are copyrighted (like websites), Google allows authors to opt-out of the search engine. In contrast to Google, Microsoft has adopted an opt-in approach; in other words, Microsoft only indexes books that are no longer copyrighted or books which have been approved for indexing by their authors via Microsoft’s Publisher Program. However, in this Battle, the arguments of Google are weak. Indeed their opt-out approach is not justifiable and can not be compared to websites indexing insofar as the authors have never come down in favor of an online use of their books. Moreover, opt-out approaches on the Internet are not very popular: take for example the Spam issue.

Microsoft’s opportunity

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As Forbes explains it, Microsoft’s attack against Google is strategic. For 10 years, Microsoft has been criticized because of his supremacy and its monopolistic will which has been illustrated by anti-trust trials; whereas Google enjoys a very good image. Thus, by criticizing and bashing Google, Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from its opponent and position itself on a higher moral ground.

So, its time for Google to adjust its strategy and to remenber its “Don’t be Evil” mantra or else Microsoft is going to use it against it, which is dangerous for Google whose capitalization is in a great extent based on its popularity.