Page vs machine

The US Justice Department has intervened in the legal battle over Googles glorious books project,saying that the settlement between Google and publishers and authors should not go through in its current form,given its large consequences.

In an act of unprecedented chutzpah,Google simply began digitising books from libraries,hoping to put the worlds knowledge on tap,online. It has been hammering out a class action settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers an earlier settlement was rejected by foreign rights-holders and rival companies. Out-of-print,orphan books are the crux of the issue at one level,Google Books makes them globally available,and the authors get a readership and revenue instead of languishing in remote libraries. At another level,this gives Google a virtual monopoly in digital books. After legal wrangling for the last 15 months,Google and its partners have softened the settlement,but core issues remain.

The Google deal makes up to 20 per cent of even protected

works available to the public an unprecedented level of free access. It is patently a better deal for both the public and for authors than what currently exists. But in a larger sense,the deal could be disastrous for how we consume culture,replacing the right to browse,weighing down reading with legal stricture if the whole work can be held up by single components like,say,illustrations. Think of how movies are riddled with copyright claims,split into different licensable bits making it extremely difficult to digitise or put into the public domain later. As Harvard law professor and free culture advocate Lawrence Lessig says,The deal constructs a world in which control can be exercised at the level of a page,and maybe even a quote.