Google and Fair Use

News.com’s Declan McCullogh looks at the copyright suits where Google is a defendant: Copyright tussles for Google: “As Google becomes more deeply interested in books and video, and expands its search domain beyond Web pages, it has found itself increasingly at odds with established copyright industries including book publishers, journalists, and professional photographers.”
Frank Pasquale, Madisonian: <Would Google Go Out of Business Without Fair Use?>: “I’ve also thought that the worst outcome in these cases would be Google’s decision to use its massive cash reserves to settle all the cases. For that would help set a precedent that might seal its (and perhaps a few other high-market-capped search engines) dominance over the field. Who else would have the cash reserves to compete in the search engine market, given the huge barriers to entry created by licensing fees?”
William McGeveran, Info/Law: Google, Fair Use, and Settlement: “So, not only would settlements lock in Google as the super-dominant player as Pasquale says (and as many techies have begun to fear anyway), it also would short-circuit the movement of the law to a reasonable accommodation of search technology. To be sure, that movement is slow, indirect, and sometimes fumbling, but it is happening.”
McGeveran goes on to discuss the analogy of academic fair uses settlements between publishers and universities. The end result being that the actual practices of fair use are constrained to a much smaller set of actions that the law proscribes.
Previously: Thoughts on Fair Use