Lately there seems to have been quite a bit of ‘buzz’ around Googles policy over the rights to data. So we have newspapers getting upset that the likes of Google trawling their content, then with authors getting upset by Google digitising books and the latest with the new ‘buzz’ service which used peoples email contacts to automatically enrol them into a social network.

Seems what we need in a digital age is a new base line principle for this stuff so here is my suggestion.

No one can change your own ‘information state’ without your explicit permission.

Clearly newspaper sites offer their content publicly so the articles they write are publicly viewable. Thus a search crawler like Google doesn’t need explicit permission to view that data nor make a link to it. Google shouldn’t simply use the content unattributed since that surely breaks copyright?

The ‘information state’ for the articles is public; so Google is free to use it with attribution.

If the newspaper really wants to hide stuff behind a membership wall they can. They can change the ‘information state’ to protected and then Google shouldn’t be able to crawl or bypass that protected state by providing links to articles with explicit permission.

Googles attempt to digitise books (including those where the copyright author can’t be found) should not be allowed because by default the information belongs to the copyright holder. That’s what copyright means: it is a license to make a copy. Digitising the book breaks copyright. Googles argument that authors can opt-out is insufficient since it is Google changing the status of things, not the authors. Authors should have to opt-in, as the owners they are the only ones who have the right to change the ‘information state’.

And buzz should have been the most obvious of all - emails and email addresses are owned by the account holder. If Google wanted to make use of that data they should require a specific opt-in. Providing an opt-out is not good enough since they didn’t own the information in the first place.

So OK this might not be worded well enough for a law, but I’m sure the legals could convert it to a 800 page document with ease! It’s the underlying principle which is important. Principles which have taken centuries to develop are creaking in the digital age, perhaps we need to develop some new ones.