Google follows Microsoft's path of "Cheat first, fight it out in court later"

Google is being sued for "massive copyright infringement" by a group of authors over the search giant's unauthorised use of their published & copyrighted works on Google Print.

This reeks of Microsoft, to me. No, I'm not saying Google is Microsoft, but the duplicity with which Google is gathering up, reformatting & re-presenting stuff that doesn't belong to them reminds me of MS's dodgy tactics towards Netscape et al (i.e. any competitor) before they were officially rapped over the knuckles & told to get clean not so very long ago.

Obviously authors aren't directly competing against Google, and, should we believe the company's protestations, Google is, in fact, doing all writers a huge favour in making their works more widely accessible.

It's kinda missing the point, however, in much the same way Napster completely missed the point.

Google argues that they do give copyright holders the opportunity to withdraw their works from the database, but this is laughable, really, as stated so well by Paul Aiken, executive director of one of the plaintiff groups, the Authors Guild. From the article:

[The] offer turned longstanding precedents in copyright law upside down, requiring owners to pre-emptively protect rights rather than requiring a user to gain approval for use of a copyrighted work.

Shall be very interesting to watch where this one goes.