Google's latest brush with controversy has centred around its "Print for Libraries" scheme. It's not secret that Google's aim is to digitalise and index all human knowledge, but it is currently trying to maintain the balance between the clear advantages of making this knowledge available to all, and trampling all over the Copyright protection given to authors and publishers.

Whilst Google's problems are on a grand scale, it's worth remembering that even the smallest website can fall foul of the copyright laws. Copying any text from other websites or from hard copy sources is bad form, and could get your site banned from the search engines. It's much better to write the copy yourself, or pay someone else to do it (visit WebTrafficker to see how we can help), but if time is short, you can reproduce content with a little bit of research and not too much expense.

Many websites offer you the opportunity to re-produce all or part of their content. Costs for this vary from nothing at all, to a fee that's dependent on the the length of article you want to copy. Some sites will allow you to re-produce whole sections of  content for free, providing you credit the site and add a link to it from your own site. Others will allow you to reproduce the first paragraph, or a selected section of text, and then ask you to link to their site so that readers have to visit them to read the whole piece. For a fee, many sites will allow you to take an entire article, but you will still be required to put their credit against it.

Re-producing articles from hard-copy sources is more time consuming. Newspapers and magazines will often have a specialist who deals with licensing and syndicating their content. This is a good money-spinner for the publishers, so there will almost certainly be a fee. You may think that it's worth taking the risk and copying text without any permission or credit, but if you do so and are found out, there will be a hefty fine to pay, and some search engines may consider removing your site altogether.

Overall, it is far better, both in business terms and for search engine optimisation, for you to create your own content. By all means, read the news and use the details to write something that's relevant to your business, but don't risk everything by infringing copyright. And keep an eye on what happens with Google; pitting the world's largest search engine against the combined power of the publishing industry makes for an interesting story.