Google's Digital Rights Scheme: Pure Hypocrisy

Google has been pooh-poohing authors and publishers, who are suing Google for violating their copyrights by scanning copyrighted books without the copyright holders' permissions. But at the same time Google ignores copyright law, it has developed its own digital-rights-management scheme for protecting copyrighted data downloaded from its new pay-for-video site. The copyright-protection scheme will protect for-pay videos downloaded from Google's for-pay video site, according to the Wall Street Journal.

How can Google justify what appears to be this kind of hypocrisy when it comes to copyright law? It doesn't have to. In both company, business models are all that's important to the search giant.

Copyright-protecting downloaded videos is certainly within Google's rights, and I don't have any problems with Google developing a scheme for doing that. But at the same time, it should give up on its plan to copyright books without asking for the copyright holders' permissions.