Following on from Lisa Williams' Google does it again last week there has been some useful analysis and commentary published in the UK press. Read them quickly before they move into their pay-per-view archives. Read the rest of this article, you'll see what I mean. First up is Ben Macintyre's Paradise is paper, vellum and dust (The Times, 18 Dec 2004) from which the following extract is well worth repeating:
“Indeed, so far from destroying libraries, the internet has protected the written word as never before, and rendered knowledge genuinely democratic. Fanatics always attack the libraries first, dictators seek to control the literature, elites hoard the knowledge that is power … With the online library the books are finally safe, and the biblioclasts have been beaten, for ever.”
But that was on Saturday. On the following day we have the Sunday Times article All the world's best books at a click (Sunday Times, 19 Dec 2004) by John Sutherland, Professor of Modern English at University College London, which raises the commercial spectre:
“By the act of converting printed books to digital form Google will be creating a new copyright … Works in the public domain will effectively be privatised. Whether or not Google chooses to exercise its rights, it and its library partners will be owners of the newly processed property. So the vast reservoir of material in the out-of-copyright public domain will become 'proprietary', or pay-per-view. If we get access, it will be because we are 'allowed', not because we have the right. Great Books will go the way of Test cricket. You don’t pay, you don ’t see. Google hasn't said it will do this; but, as far as I can make out, nor has it definitely said it won't. ”
John Sutherland then goes on to suggest even the BBC's much trumpeted digital archive could be subject to such commercial pressures.
Hope with one hand. Withdrawn in the other:(
