Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

I’m A Little Rootkit / Google World Order

Sidney Verba: Lonely librarian seeking hot books? Or the new face of Google World Order?!

Don’t you love it when corporations get all Big Brother on you? Maybe Sony-BMG and Google should just merge.

Now just to clear this up–because we all know intellectual property law is the ongoing legal equivalent of a tule-fog 20-car pile-up (in which the victims are always the artists), and also because I’ve had my own recent episode in, uh, code appropriation–the two situations aren’t exactly the same.

Google wants to index every book in existence. I actually think the concept of public knowledge is a pretty good idea in principle. What some authors and publishers have a problem with is the idea that Google will retain a copy of all of the books. And their soaring stock price is a clue that they’re not exactly a public-interest entity.

Sony wants to–or at least wanted to–index every buyer of Sony CDs in existence, which is just not that good an idea.

For a hometeam take on the Rootkit debacle, visit the good fighters at Downhill Battle.

For a good description of the Plan-Formerly-Known-As-Google-Print debacle, check this NY Times piece on poor old Harvard librarian Sidney Verba.

For an interesting, if not unflawed, alternative to Google World Order, check this piece which introduces you to Mr. Enthusiasm, Brewster Kahle.

Now, search Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. Go head! I won’t sue you!

posted by Jeff Chang @ 12:12 pm | 6 Comments

6 Responses to “I’m A Little Rootkit / Google World Order”

Hashim says:

November 22, 2005 at 2:02 pm

Search turns a great book into an excellent resource.

Now, next time I want to write on a topic I know your book covers, I’ll use Google to search inside the book.
Jeff says:

November 22, 2005 at 2:46 pm

Hashim, didn’t you turn us all on to this in the first place?

As a researcher, it’s an amazing thing in the world. As a book buyer, it’s license to go nuts. (For that reason, I don’t entirely agree with the publishers who fear it’s a slippery slope to a book-version of OG Napster–I think this will only help books like mine.)

And as an author, it’s damned frightening. Tho maybe not for the same reasons publishers fear. Now I can lose sleep over the ability of anyone to do a search for a corny turn-of-phrase or mushheaded argument to throw back in my face. Yikes…
wayne&wax says:

November 23, 2005 at 6:18 am

re: googlespiracy theory-

this was making the rounds a while back, but it’s definitely worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet.

http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
Anonymous says:

November 24, 2005 at 1:12 am

Thing I noticed about the Google book search is that, while it makes it easy to find information and such, it would be a bitch and a half to, say, snatch an entire book and print it out. I’m thinking hours and hours, if it’s a book of any substantial size… that makes full-on piracy pretty preposterous.
-Akio
Brother OMi says:

November 24, 2005 at 7:29 am

its bugged cause these cats always say they come in the public’s best interests, but then they do something like this

i am an upcoming writer who will go indie.. what will happen to folks like me?
wayne&wax says:

November 24, 2005 at 8:05 am

there’s been some illuminating discussion of google print/booksearch at siva’s blog.

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