Google and the World Brain Page #4

With its 17 million active workers,

it is the Memory Of Mankind.

You can look at the Internet

as something divine.

We eventually will come, I think,

to revere some of our

technological creations,

like the Internet,

to be almost like cathedrals

of redwoods,

to be as complicated

and as beautiful

as natural creations.

And that, in a real sense,

that there is more of God

in a cellphone

than there is in a tree frog,

because a cellphone is

an additional layer of evolution

over the natural frog.

It's a new form of medieval church

or something like that.

Everybody is to give their data

in service of worship

of this digital god.

And I think it's really,

really dumb.

It's not unique to this era,

you can look at previous

technologies, whether it was radio,

whether it was television,

whether it was the telegraph,

it was electricity,

you do have many similar hopes -

that those technologies will bring

universal communication,

people will talk to one another,

there will be peace everywhere,

education will spread globally...

A lot of similar hopes

have been expressed

in connection with earlier

technologies.

So this is nothing new, but I think

there is something about the scale

at which projects and groups and

various companies and organisations

now are putting those cyber-utopian

beliefs to work

that is different now

than from what it was before.

Science fiction never imagined

Google.

Google is a game-changing tool

on the order of the equally handy

flint hand axe.

But Google is not ours.

We are its unpaid content providers,

in one way or another.

We generate product for Google,

our every search a miniscule

contribution.

Google is made of us,

a sort of coral reef of human minds

and their products.

We have yet to take

Google's measure.

I do think that Google genuinely

wants to make all of the world's

information organised and available

to people throughout the globe.

I do think that they genuinely

believe in that mission.

Um... But they also happen to believe

that nothing will get lost

and no-one will get harmed

if it's Google who will implement

that mission.

And I think it's normal.

If they didn't trust themselves

to do it, then they would be...

you know, they would have some

weird schizophrenic problem,

you know, if they don't trust

themselves

to implement their own project.

One of the concerns which came out,

as you would expect from France,

was that this was really

part of a plot

in the United States to make English

the universal language

and, as we know, the most important

thing about France,

aside from its wine,

is its language.

And there was a real sense

that who are we to be digitising

all those books in English?

And I remember some correspondence

about the fact

that we, at Harvard, were not

just digitising English books,

but were digitising a very large

number of books in French.

To which, if I remember correctly,

the response came back,

"Who are you to digitise

books in French?"

First, we learned that Google

was scanning books.

And I remember loving that idea,

because I'm a reader and I write

non-fiction books and I do research

and I wanted access to those books.

Then, we heard that they were

scanning our books,

they were scanning copyrighted books

and they hadn't asked

anyone's permission.

The libraries had just

handed them over.

Well, that was obviously a

violation of our copyrights

and a little bit of a surprise,

to put it mildly.

I remember being very curious

about what they were doing

and I popped my name into Google

and saw that it came up

with snippets of my books.

So what I did was

I searched for terms

that I knew were common in my book,

like "star", "galaxy",

and there were lots and lots of hits

and it would display

several snippets.

And then, I would search

for other common words

and it was clear that if you were

clever about your searches,

you could see quite a bit

of the text, if not all of it.

The problem that most authors have

is obscurity.

That's the issue.

There are a gazillion books.

How do you get people

to pay attention to yours?

Google claimed that its use of these

millions of copyrighted books

that it had digitised

was an example of fair use.

Why? I'm not sure.

I still don't understand

how that can be justified.

The point is that the entire book

has been copied

and it's been copied by a single

company that's doing it for purposes

of profiting off the work.

If you allow a profit-making company

to copy a million books,

then, how can you say no

to the next enterprise

that also wants to copy

the million books?

So The Authors Guild organised

a class action suit,

asking them to stop doing that.

The Authors Guild on Tuesday filed a

lawsuit against search engine Google

alleging that scanning

and digitising library books

constitutes a massive copyright

infringement.

The Authors Guild represents

more than 8,000 authors

and it's the largest society

of published writers

in the United States.

When Google made its decision

to scan these millions of books,

it certainly realised that, depending

upon how litigation developed,

this could be a bet-the-company

decision.

Because copyright liability in the

United States can be quite extreme -

$150,000 per copyrighted work.

And, depending on the number

of copyrighted works at stake,

it could be in the billions

of dollars.

The Association of American

Publishers

has filed a lawsuit against Google

alleging the Internet company's

plan to scan

and digitally distribute the text

of major library collections

would violate copyright protections.

I think the issue of copyright

is an archaic, unproductive view.

When you create something,

you're building on the work

of other people,

no matter who you are,

whether you are JK Rowling

or Shakespeare.

You're basing your work

on the work of others.

You're basically taking their ideas.

An artist does not own their ideas.

No artist does.

Any useful information exists

because of the efforts of real people

and copyright is our way of

remembering who those people are.

It's crucial to not lose that.

And I think cyber culture is missing

the point of copyright.

You might say, "Well,

who cares about authors?

"Let a few authors not make as much

money as they would have."

But it's a precedent.

The whole Internet will become

a tool for the concentration of

power and that would be a disaster.

The Internet is the world's largest

copy machine,

anything that touches it,

it's been copied.

And, just to transmit something

along the way,

um...people are making copies

of things.

Copies are valueless,

they have no worth at all

until there was a focus on copies

because that's an industrial-age

artefact.

A book is really a plateau

that a person reaches to say,

"This is my testament,

this is what I can offer."

A book is not just

an extra long tweet,

a book is something

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