ACCORDING to The Onion, the satirical online newspaper, Google is planning a new project, Google Purge, to destroy all the copyrighted books it cannot index. And it plans to erase the hard disk of any computer that doesn’t run its search engine.

“A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project,” The Onion reported.

“Now, they are promising to burn the rest. Thanks to Google Purge, you’ll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art and music.”

The spoof wouldn’t be funny if it didn’t feel so close to the truth. But it is not just Google The Onion has it in for. Microsoft, too, is in its sights because of Bill Gates’s obsession with protecting his intellectual-property rights.

Google and Microsoft are the two most dominant companies of the digital age. Most of the world’s computers run on Microsoft and the majority of internet searches are performed on Google. The two firms hate each other.

According to court documents, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, vowed to “kill” Google in an expletive-laced, chair-throwing tirade after a senior engineer told him he was leaving the company to go to work for his arch-rival. Nor is Google above name-calling. Sergey Brin, one of its co-founders, called Microsoft a “convicted monopolist” at a media meeting.

The loathing reached new levels last week when one of Microsoft’s top lawyers told America’s publishers that Google was taking a “cavalier approach to copyright”.

In a speech to American publishers in New York, Microsoft’s general counsel, Thomas Rubin, lumped Google with companies that “create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, raking in billions through advertising revenue and IPOs”.

He quoted Pat Schroeder, a former congresswoman and head of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), who said Google had “a hell of a business model — they’re going to take everything you create, for free, and sell advertising around it”.

It was a low blow at a sensitive time for the search-engine firm. After buying the video-sharing website YouTube, Google has been trying to make peace with US broadcasters over the use of their content. Much of YouTube’s most popular content comes from Big Media.

Deals with Viacom and CBS are in limbo or have collapsed. Google has also been accused of knowingly selling ads to companies profiting from pirated films, music and software.

Rubin had chosen a sympathetic audience. Google is also at loggerheads with the AAP over its plans to scan — not burn — some of the world’s major libraries and make snippets of the works available online.

Microsoft has its own rival book-digitising plans, and clearly Rubin was attempting to score points. But his speech outlined arguments that many traditional media companies have been having with Google for some time.

Once seen as a useful tool for driving customers to their own websites, Google is increasingly accused of taking advertising dollars for content it did not create and has no right to use.

In Europe media groups including Agence France-Presse, the French newswire service, and Copiepress, the Belgian copyright agency, have fought Google in court over the use of their content.

Gavin O’Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers, said the search engine company’s business was built “on the back of kleptomania”. In a speech last year O’Reilly said Google needed to come to a better commercial arrangement with media firms over the use of their content. “If you subscribe to the ten commandments, Google operates with only nine, leaving out ‘thou shalt not steal’,” he said.

O’Reilly’s argument is similar to the AAP’s problems with the Google Books project.

In going to libraries and not publishers for its books, Google had “bestowed upon itself the unilateral right to make entire copies of copyrighted books not covered by these publisher agreements without first obtaining the copyright holder’s permission”, said Rubin.

Google has been working hard to build fences with publishers. Its chief legal officer, David Drummond, hit back, saying: “In the publishing industry alone, we work with more than 10,000 partners around the world to make their works discoverable online. We do this by complying with international copyright laws, and the result has been more exposure and in many cases more revenue for authors, publishers and producers of content.”

Nor does the company keep all its money to itself. Google distributed $3.3 billion (£1.7 billion) in advertising revenue to its ad partners last year. But, as chief executive Eric Schmidt said last week, Google and the older media companies remain far apart on how they view the use of content.

Speaking about YouTube at an investor conference, Schmidt said there was a “genuine disagreement” with traditional media. They argue their content has a certain intrinsic value, while Google says “prove it”. “That’s often a difficult conversation,” he said.

Google’s business is based on making other people’s content searchable and available to its users. Stop Google from collecting more data and you hobble the giant. Something that would please another giant no end.

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