Charkin to Google: If You Can Steal, Why Can't I?
By Rachel Deahl -- Publishers Weekly, 6/4/2007 12:44:00 PM
In a move that he chronicled on his blog, Macmillan UK chief executive Richard Charkin gave Google an object lesson in stealing at BEA. On Saturday he removed one of the laptops at the Google booth, in order to highlight the ironies of Google's attitude towards copyright. In an entry on his blog, dubbed 'the heist,' Charkin explained that, since there was no sign requesting people not take the computers, he and a colleague grabbed one and took it to a nearby spot on the convention floor. When a Google employee came looking for the laptop, Charkin and accomplice said they were simply doing to Google what it does to publishers.
This "appalling piece of criminal behaviour" is "exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property," he wrote of the laptop nabbing. He then added: "I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers."
