The New York Times reports: Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database: "Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web."
LawMeme: Google to Help Libraries Put Collections Online "I look forward tremendously to having all that public domain material online: watch out publishers, because you're about to have to start competing with free in a whole new way."
John Battelle's Searchblog discusses the new development and their implicataions:
Google Library: Talk About a Long Tail..., Google To Launch Major Pilot Program with Harvard, Stanford, U Mich, Others, Print Implications: Google As Builder
Michael Madison: Google Print and P2P: "Is Google Print an information conduit? A massive, rogue P2P technology? Is it a contributory infringer? A publisher? From whom, if anyone, does it need licenses, and who, if anyone, should regulate it, and how, if at all?"
Scott Rosenberg: Google's commitment to the public: Google and the public good: "Google's leaders are demonstrating that their corporate mission statement -- 'to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful' -- is not just empty words. If you're serious about organizing the world's information, you'd better have a plan for dealing with the legacy matter of the human species' nearly three millennia of written material. So, simply, bravo for the ambition and know-how of a company that's willing to say, 'Sure, we can do it.'"
Lauren Weinstein: The Dark Side of Google: "Google has created a growing information repository of a sort that CIA and NSA (and the old KGB) would probably envy and covet in no uncertain terms -- and Google's data is virtually without outside oversight or regulation."
If Google is digitizing this vast collection of public domain works, what obligations, if any, does it have to the public?
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