Google Rules: The History and Future of Copyright Under the Influence of Google

Book

1 online resource

9780190072100 eBook

Google Rules traces the rise of Google through its legal, commercial, and political negotiations over copyright. The first part of the book shows how the public interest suffers in a digital copyright policy debate dominated by powerful industry stakeholders. The second part explores Google’s contributions to digital copyright and the copyright policies that Google enforces across its own platforms. Increasingly, Google self-regulates and negotiates with media and entertainment companies to privately devise copyright rules. Google then deploys algorithmic regulatory technologies to enforce those rules. Google’s private copyright rule-making and algorithmic enforcement limits transparency and accountability in digital copyright governance and privileges private interest and values over the public interest. Today, Google reigns over a technological and economic order that features empowered private actors and rapidly changing technological conditions. How to effectively regulate Google—in an evolving technological environment and in order to achieve public interest outcomes—is one of the most pressing policy questions of our time. Google Rules provides several strategies for taking up this challenge. While the parameters may be narrowly set upon one firm and one area of intellectual property law, ultimately, the book is a contribution to a much broader conversation about a new generation of monopolistic companies, born from the technological developments of the digital age, and the social, political, and economic influence they have acquired in contemporary society.

Online resource

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020

English