Journalism fair use

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051503000.html?sid=ST2009060402767

This article by Bruce Brown and Bruce Stanford of the Washington Post from earlier this year talks about how journalism is a dying industry, but can be saved by a few simple changes to the law. Some of the changes they propose pertain to copyright laws and fair use. Their main target in this article is google, claiming that the age of the search engine is what is killing the journalism industry, because they "crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path." The article proposes that google should follow the fair use doctrine, which allows for the use of a quote or two from any given article, without stealing the whole thing for their news database. The current system is making it very difficult for journalistic media, a traditional print media, to transfer into the digital age, especially because search engines like google are able to take their copyrighted material if they submit their websites into the search database, so they are forced to choose whether they want to be excluded from a network that most people use to look up news, or risk having their content ripped apart and plagiarized by google. The simple solution, according to this article, is to instill fair use rules, where google can only use so much of the article in their news section.