Copyright has always been a sprawling mess because of the opacity of copyright laws. In recent years, it has become worse because of two factors. First, rapidly advancing digital technology can make an illicit copy appear as perfect as the original and sometimes even better. Second, with the extension of protections mandated by the international Copyright Act, 1998, it is not always clear which works are protected.

Earlier, it was a simple rule of thumb: all works were protected for 50 years after the author’s death, then they went into public domain. But this has become murky now because copyright can be extended by the author’s estate. The rules of copyright are so ambiguous and the courts so slow, that the judicial system serves largely to implement the law of the jungle. Policing is difficult and even if some Ali Babas are caught, there are enough thieves around.

For many years, publishers let things pass, but they can no longer sit back and watch their books slip into public domain because Google intends to scan every book ever published and make full texts searchable in the same way as websites can be searched from the company’s engine, google.com. Google’s corporate philosophy is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

From a purely technological point of view, this is possible but it won’t be easy to get over the legal hurdle. Publishers and authors will both fight tooth and nail to protect their rights because, after all, all this involves their livelihood. Although, corporates like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo may not get all they want, they could surely make a dent in the some of the rules of the game. So, some international publishers who have seen the writing on the wall go around quoting Charles Darwin that “it is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change”. Change of some kind is already in the wind. For one, Google seems to have relented on copyrighted books. They are prepared to negotiate with publishers and authors (or their successors) on the compensation package that would be given for permission to reproduce materials.

Being charged with copyright infringement could prove expensive in terms of time and money. So new contracts would include a ‘digital clause’ that would give the copyright owner the right to reserve the digital rights or simply to give them away with the rest of the rights. The question remains if digitization can be stopped. It cannot be, because of the march of technology. It all started with photocopying — entire books are still being photocopied in corner shops and sold at a tenth of their published prices. The clock can’t be pushed back now.