Google's copyright wars ... record profits and share price

April 20th was the birthday of Jean Miró (born 1893) and Google reworked their logo to look like some of the artist's work.

The Artists Rights Society, representing the Miró family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, demanded Google remove the logo.A Miró family member logged onto Google's on Thursday and was upset discovered a reworked logo that incorporated images used in multiple copyrighted works.

``It's a distortion of the original works and in that respect it violates the moral rights of the artist,'' said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society (ARC). ``There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró, and they are putting it up without having the rights.''

Google said that it would honor the request but that it did not believe its logo was a copyright violation.

Google frequently changes the logo on its home page to reflect or honour people's acheivements Olympics or Albert Einstein's birthday, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day. Thursday's logo had painted versions of each letter in the Google name -- allegedly incorporating images from Miró's "The Escape Ladder,'' 1940; "Nocturne,'' 1940; and "The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers,'' 1941.

This isn't the first time the ARC have had to complain, they did in May 2002 when images created by Salvador Dali were allegedly incorporated into the logo. Google removed the Dali images soon after it was contacted by the society.

In September, the Authors Guild sued Google for reproducing works in a "library project" that were still under the protection of copyright. In a press release, Authors Guild President Nick Taylor called the project ``a plain and brazen'' violation of copyright law.

Mountain View,CA.-based Google reported 1Q net income today of $592 million, ( $1.95 a share) up from $369 million ( $1.29 a share) a year earlier.

Shares closed up 5.3% to $437.10 after trading as high as $450.72 in early action. The stock has risen more than 20% since hitting an intraday low of $331 on March 10 and nearly 500% since launch.

Today's logo, it being Earth Day reminds us of the sunny Mountain View skies with their onshore breezes ... perhaps bags of gold rather than golden sunlight might be more appropriate ?