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Google and the World Brain

Transcript

Google and the World Brain (2013) Movie Script
There is no practical obstacle whatever now
to the creation of an efficient index
to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements.
To the creation, that is,
of a complete planetary memory for all mankind.
He was one of the early inventors of science fiction.
The idea of time travel,
the possibility of invisibility...
..of intergalactic struggles.
And then, he came up with ideas
of how we might reorganize the knowledge apparatus of the world,
which he called the World Brain.
For Wells, the World Brain had to contain
all that was learnt and known
and that was being learnt and known.
If you have access to anything that's been written,
not just theoretical access,
but like instant access next to your brain,
that changes your idea of who you are.
It can be reproduced exactly
and fully in Peru, China, Iceland,
Central Africa or wherever else.
They were frank in their ambition
and dazzling in their ability to execute it.
The Google Books scanning project
is clearly the most ambitious World Brain scheme
that has ever been invented.
This is no remote dream, no fantasy.
It is a plain statement of a contemporary state of affairs.
The nightmare scenario, in 20 years' time,
would be Google tracking everything we read.
Google could basically hold the whole world hostage.
Ever since Wells,
science fiction is always about the possibility
that people won't really matter in the future.
And the plot is always about some heroic person
that either succeeds or doesn't succeed
in proving that people really matter after all.
It's a library, a public library,
where people go to look at books,
and read them and take them away.
That girl works at the library and she checks on books
that are going out and books that are coming back in.
I love libraries.
I like the smell,
the smell of paper properly preserved.
It's as if it's the smell of a hay barn
that's been cleared of all its animals
and made into a human intelligence.
And in a library, you really... even
if you're sitting in the tearoom,
discussing your latest findings,
it's amazing how much social interaction with other people
will actually help you to enrich what you're doing.
'In this part of the library,
'the grown-ups can read the stories to the children.'
People sometimes say to me, aren't libraries obsolete?
Um... It's... It's absurd -
they are nerve centres,
centres of intellectual energy.
Libraries stand for an ideal,
which is an educated public.
And to the degree that knowledge is power,
they also stand there for the idea
that power should be disseminated and not centralised.
The first appeal of Google's enterprise,
when we saw it, was just digitising millions and millions of books.
At Harvard, we have, by far,
the greatest university library in the world.
It's enormous - 17 million volumes.
And every library wants its holdings digitised
for lots for reasons, including preservation.
But, beyond that, it raises the possibility
of sharing your intellectual wealth.
I think of the Harvard Library as an international asset.
Something that should be opened up
and shared with the general population.
So here comes Google.
They've got the energy, they've got the technology,
they've got the money and they said, "We'll do it for you. Free!"
Pamela SamuelsonGoogle did such a fabulous job in creating a vision,
not only that a universal digital library could be created,
but that it could be done today.
The Google engineers are like good engineers everywhere,
they just like to think about,
"How do we surmount these challenges?"
They sort of leave the lawsuit to the lawyers to worry about.
Amit Sanjal?Google's a company that believes in its fundamental mission
of empowering everyone in this world
with all the information they need.
Enriched with the right information,
people can make better decisions for themselves,
their families and their communities.
This world is full of wonderful individuals
which have varied needs.
From a farmer in Africa to a mother in India,
to a business person in Japan.
Everyone needs information in this modern day and age.
And Google believes in breaking all the barriers
between every individual and the information they seek.
old white guyWhen you actually negotiate with Google
and do so on their turf,
you enter a strange world.
A Google office doesn't have chairs like this chair,
the furniture consists of large inflated balls
that are coloured green or red or yellow
and the young Google engineers are sitting on these.
It's a kind of Never Never Land feeling.
VerbaAbout ten years ago, I got a visit from a vice president of Google.
And she walked into my office
and described a project that Google had in mind,
which was to digitise
all the books in the Harvard Library.
My first thought was, to put it bluntly,
that maybe they were smoking something,
because I didn't think it was possible.
Harvard had been digitising books from time to time,
but they were very limited in number and we didn't do many,
it was a very expensive and complicated project.
I don't remember exactly,
but it was several hundred dollars just for a single book.
But they had invented a copying station
that was a lot cheaper and easier to use,
that didn't damage the books
or, at least, went out of its way not to damage the books.
And it seemed to me that it had a lot of plausibility.
And so, we decided to... to give it a try.
old white guyEvery great library did digitising, sometimes on a large scale,
our Open Collections Programme digitised 2.3 million pages.
I mean, that's big.
But nothing like as big as what Google attempted to do.
The sheer ambition of digitising everything.
WB RaywardIn the ancient world, at the Library of Alexandria,
they copied rolls and tablets,
and attempted to copy all that was known.
And, eventually, the library was destroyed by Julius Caesar
and the loss of that library in Alexandria
was an international catastrophe.
Richard OvendenThe universal library's been talked about for millennia.
There's a kind of a continuity of development
and, you know, we mustn't forget the important role
that libraries and scholars have always made
for millennia of copying.
And then, you see, with the development of printing,
the multiplicity of texts,
the copying of original texts.
It was possible to think in the Renaissance
that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge
in a single room or a single institution.

French description of encyclopedia as monumental in French enlightenment

RaywardThen, in the 19th century,
you have various suggestions in France and Belgium
that you can create a catalogue of everything.
What will come next is microfilm.
And so, you start finding huge microfilming projects.
And so, for us, the Google Project was a sort of a natural extension
of that process of development.
Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart, was the first digital library.
He started on the fourth of July, in early 1970s,
by going and typing the Declaration of Independence
so that everybody could have access to it.
Thousands of volunteers worked from all over the world
to go and build this.
Kurzweil He even had the idea that it ought to be possible
to download the entire library
that he had created if you wanted that.
And I think it did act as a kind of example of something
that, later on, Google and others
took up in a much bigger, more extensive way.
My name is Raymond Kurzweil and I'm from Queens, New York.
'When I was 12, I became fascinated with pattern recognition.'
And, as a young teenager,
I did a project to teach computers
how to recognise patterns in music.
I've built a computer
and, by feeding it certain relationships and music,
I was able to write music with it.
- Raymond, how old are you?
- I'm 17.
Do your parents know what you've been up to?
Recognising printed letters was a classical unsolved problem
in the field of pattern recognition.
And so, I created the first
This was about 1975.
And we talked about how you could ultimately scan all books
and all printed material.
HG Wells broadcast'When automobiles came along first,
'they seemed likely to become a rich man's monopoly.
'They cost upward of a thousand pounds.
'Henry Ford altered all that.
'He put the poor man on the road.
'We want a Henry Ford today
'to modernise the distribution of knowledge,
'make good knowledge cheap and easy,
'in this still very ignorant, ill-educated,
'ill-served English-speaking world of ours,
'which might be the greatest power on Earth for the good of mankind.'
KahleWe started the Internet Archive in 1996.
The idea was to have all the published works of humankind
available to everybody,
that this was the opportunity of our generation,
that... like the previous
generation had put a man on the moon.
The Internet Archive had been completely open with Google.
In fact, I'd gone and given a speech that was attended
by, I think, all of the senior executives
on how one could go about building a digital library
of all books, music, video,
and I'd hoped that there was going to be a way to work with them,
but that was not to be.
Libraries had signed secret agreements with Google...
We didn't know what was really going on.
When it started coming out as a completely separate project,
and not working with others,
then, I started to become suspicious.

From Sergey Brin A library to last forever

Larry Page, who founded Google with me,
first proposed that we digitise all books a decade ago,
when we were a fledgling start-up.
Five years later, in 2004,
Google Books was born.
Despite a number of important digitisation efforts to date,
none have been at a comparable scale,
simply because no-one else has chosen
to invest the requisite resources.
If Google Books is successful, others will follow.

Morozov I don't think that Google is aware of the fact that it's a corporation.
I think Google does think of itself as an NGO
that just happens to make a lot of money.
And they think of themselves as social reformers
who just happen to have their stock traded on stock exchanges
and who just happen to have investors and shareholders,
but they do think of themselves
as ultimately being in the business of making the world better.

Mary Sue Coleman There are few more irreparable property losses
than vanished books.
Nature, politics and war have always been
the mortal enemies of written works.
Most recently, Hurricane Katrina dealt a blow
to the libraries of the Gulf Coast.
At Tulane University, the main library sat in nine feet of water.
In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime, in Cambodia,
decimated cultural institutions throughout the country.
Khmer Rouge fighters took over the National Library
throwing the books into the street, burning them,
while using the stacks as a pigsty.
Now, with Google, the University of Michigan is involved
in one of the most extensive preservation projects
in world history.

Jaron Lanier Google Books is a potent idea on a number of dimensions.
What I like about Google Books
is the idea of not losing books,
especially books that might be genuinely abandoned.
The idea of getting all that stuff online
is, of course, going to be a benefit,
so that, we have to love.

Reginald Carr I went to Google in January 2003.
I actually made, what now I feel quite embarrassed about,
I made a presentation to them,
telling them what they ought to be doing.
Only to find out a few months later
that they'd actually been doing it for a while already.
Project Ocean was the kind of
code name, development code name,
that Google were giving to what eventually became Google Books.
So it was called Project Ocean because it was big, I imagine.
Google seemed to think that they could do
almost a million in three years.

Old White Guy You could say that this mass digitisation
is something like running a huge machine through a library.
You take books by the shelf.
They are put in cartons, on carts.
They are loaded onto trucks.
And then, Google at this time had three places in the country
where it was doing digitisation.
Supposedly, it didn't give the address of where they were.
Samuelson Google won't say how much scanning all the books cost.
But there are estimates that...
well, it's somewhere between 30 and 100 per book,
so if you multiply that times 20 million...
Other old white guy Google, early on,
bent over backwards to keep us from communicating
with the other libraries.
There were three or four large ones
and each of us was told we should not tell the others
what kind of a contract we had and
how we were working with Google.

Reginald Carr To begin with, it had to be kept fairly quiet.
It was probably mid 2003 when I started to take the wraps off
in terms of this is going to be a possibility
that we might be working with Google.
I witnessed the scale of the operation
and it was very impressive.
with very high-resolution cameras
sitting on top of a cradle
with very intense lights.
And, underneath, a lot of black boxes, which, presumably,
contained all of Google's algorithms
that makes Google search what it is.
And they uploaded that stuff straight to Mountain View,
straight from Oxford.
Larry Lessig Google certainly depends on knowing more and more and more
for their algorithm to be better and better and better.
And this is the core of the way
economics in this space now works.

Verba They had a specific interest in having lots of things in Google
that would lead people to use Google
so they could make money by having advertisements there.
Samuelson What are books? They are full of data
and so, the more data you have,
the more you can fine-tune your search technologies.
Lanier Some of the enthusiasts for Google's way of gathering data,
and it's not just Google at all, I mean,
it's Silicon Valley in general.
It's the current cultural moment
and includes the other Silicon Valley companies,
but also the modern world of finance.
And also, the modern world of spy craft for states
and also the modern world of criminality.
And the modern world of insurance and health care.
All these things have this idea
that you grab all this data in order to become very powerful,
you create a differential in your ability to see information
versus the ordinary person.
And you create these new incredible castles of power,
but it's OK, it's not just traditional power mongering,
because you're making the world more efficient.

Amit S I was a little boy in the '70s growing up in India,
watching re-runs of Star Trek on our family's black-and-white TV.
And from that, those times,
the picture of a Star Trek computer
was deeply ingrained in my head.
As a little boy, I was just fascinated by the fact
that you can walk up to a computer and ask it,
"Computer, what's the atmosphere of that planet?"
That was just the most fascinating thing to a little boy
and, from that day on,
it was my dream to build that Star Trek computer.
Only later would I grow up and realise it's really hard,
because computers don't understand language.
And I went through this brief period
of disbelief as a graduate student,
where I didn't think I would reach my dream in my lifetime.
But thanks to Google
and all the technologies that we have built here,
and what I see in the pipeline,
I'm closer to my dream than ever.
Um...

Head Google Books Spain en espanol

Once we began developing...goal was to include other forms of content

Roure: On the Internet you can surf from one page to another and not

it seemed to us that this was a way to spread our culture

what happenis if someone turns all this into a biz and makes a profit from it?

I am not in a comment to on anything other than the digitisation and the access to these books from wherever that may be

Monserrat and the monks

Carr Google were and are free to do what they want with the scans.
And why should that concern us?
I mean, part of our ethos
and part of our objective as a library
is to make the information that's contained in our library available
as free of charge as we can possibly
make it to anybody who needs it.
And if Google is going to do that on a larger scale, that's fine.
If they are going to make money out of it down the line, why not?
You know, they've invested a lot of money in it.
Um... There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Morozov Who wouldn't want to have all of the world's knowledge available to everyone on the planet?
The problem is that Google, as an intermediary in this process,
has certain interests and has a certain agenda
that is not always transparent.
Lanier If you, in Silicon Valley, you have another job,
which is you're building this new life form
that's going to take over the world
and Google is providing the memories for its brain
or the other companies are providing the memories,
and this is something that's openly talked about.
Kevin Kelly (Wired) It's all human knowledge in books and out of books woven together into a single entity
that's accessible by anybody, anywhere in the world, any time.
And that "all knowledge" is transformative.
It really kicks up the civilisation in our society into another level.
Lessig Shortly after the launch of Google Books,
in different events, I ran into Larry Page and Sergey Brin
and had this brief exchange with them about the potential.
And, you know, there was a characteristic Google-founder response,
which was a kind of glint in their eyes and a smile
and the sense that this was just the beginning
of something much bigger than even you at this point can imagine.
Robert Darnton (Harvard) (old white guy)At Harvard, we only permitted Google to digitise books in the public domain,
but the other research libraries that Google first went to
permitted Google to digitise books covered by copyright.
As soon as you get into the copyright area,
things get rapidly complicated. (6 million copyrighted books scanned without
Mary Sue Coleman We're allowing Google to scan all of our books,
those in the public domain and those still in copyright.
We believe it is legal,
ethical and a noble endeavour that will transform our society.
Legal because we believe copyright law allows us fair use
of the millions of books that are being digitised.
Lewis Hyde Fair use is a piece of American copyright law that allows us
to make copies without ever asking any permission,
without paying any fee for certain carved-out uses.
Pam Samuelson I happen to think Google's fair use defence is strong. One of the things that courts have done,
over the last decade or so,
is decided that search engines,
who routinely make copies of information,
are making fair uses when they do it in order to help people
find information that they are looking for.
One of the things Google has done is provide links
to places where you can buy the book.
Lewis Hyde They scanned, but they did not release the copy.
You could not search, except for key words.
You could not see a page, except for snippets.
They were trying to allow indexing and searching,
without allowing people to get copies.
Coleman And we will protect all copyrighted materials,
your work in that archive.
Let me repeat that.
I guarantee you we will protect all copyrighted materials.
I assure you we understand
that providing public access to materials and copyright,
particularly those still in print, would be unlawful.
Morozov One of the things that you need to understand about Google is that they try to roll out projects first
and then, to think about the consequences later.
So you will often see them experiment
with something that looks very cool,
maybe the Google Street View Project...
Narrator Google launched Street View in 2007,
part of the search engine's long-term goal
to create a virtual 3D map of the whole planet,
right down to street level.
But investigations have revealed
that Google Street View cars
were collecting more than just photographs for their databanks.
Their antennas were also hoovering up personal information
from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks,
including Internet history and passwords.
Morozov I think the case of Google collecting Wi-Fi information,
it reveals a complete lack of respect
for privacy within the corporation.
Such projects often reveal that Google does not fully understand
the social consequences of its own work.
Kaiser Kuo, Baidu (China) We actually do more search queries in China alone than any other search company does
in any other single-national market,
by which I really mean Google in the United States.
So we certainly do aspire to be a World Brain.
I think HG Wells was, I mean,
he is well known for having been quite prescient
about a lot of the things that he envisaged.
Sure we don't have the time machine yet,
but pretty much the rest of it was dead on.
We have a product, which is a very, very popular product,
it's called Baidu Wenku,
the Chinese name of it is the Baidu Library.
It allows people to upload materials that they have
that are either of their own creation,
or that they have the intellectual property rights to, to our site.

{Yu Chun Lei Super Scanning Center}

Kaiser Kuo There isn't an area of human knowledge
that hasn't been filled out and made more rich and wondrous
by the fact of the Internet.
I am often sort of shocked by people who see it
as the beginnings of this dystopian future.
I embrace it unequivocally.
Wells, "The Shape of Things To Come" The Fundamental Knowledge System
which accumulates, sorts, keeps in order
and renders available everything that is known
centres on Barcelona.
With its 17 million active workers,
it is the Memory Of Mankind.

Marenostrom in Barcelona

Jordi Torres

bearded white guy name above 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.
Lanier 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.
Morozov 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.

From Sergey Brin;s website William Gibson? 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.

 

President of National Library of France -- insulted by thermos gift -- they miscalculated; he planned a counter-offensice in

When Google Challenges Europe -- article published

Morozov 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.
Verba 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?"
James Gleick 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.
Charles Seife 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.
bearded white guy 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?
Gleick 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.
recorded news narrator 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.
Lessig 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 -$150k per copyrighted work
And, depending on the number of copyrighted works at stake,
it could be in the billions of dollars.
recorded narrator 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.
Kevin Kelly (bearded guy) 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.
Lanier 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.
Kelly 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.
Roland ReussHeidelberg (German) wrote an article that told of the illegality and criticized the scanning quality "as if they put these books through a meat grinder"

Lanier 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 that's hard to do.
It's hard to finish. It's hard to publish.
It's a certain achievement of scale,
it's a declaration of this is what my life has learned,
this is what I can offer.
And that is not something that can be dissected
and the little minced pieces simply can't mean the same thing.
Samuelson The lawsuits were commenced in the fall of 2005
and, within six months,
the Authors Guild and the publishers came to Google
with a proposal about settling the lawsuit.
Darnton I was sitting innocently in my office
and a lawyer for the university appeared and he said,
"You are about to take a non-disclosure oath."
Well, I'd never had anything to do with lawyers,
except once in my life when I made a will and I thought,
"Um, I'm in deep water now. What is this all about?"
Well, it turned out that there were secret negotiations
between Google, on the one hand,
and The Authors Guild and The Association
of American Publishers on the other.
They were suing Google for infringement of copyright
and, as happens frequently with suits,
they began to negotiate a settlement.
Well, we were not part of that at Harvard.
However, we had to be informed
about it because we had the books.
Gleick It took three years to work it out,
because there were a lot of issues to be discussed.
There were publishers at the table as well as authors.
And publishers and authors did not have identical interests.
There were libraries, not at the table, but very much in the picture.
They were talking to Google away from the room.
And I'm not sure how much I can say.
I definitely cannot talk specifically about the negotiations
because I signed a non-disclosure agreement,
which I'm told is still in force,
and I don't want to go to jail.
narrator Google's long-running legal battle with the US publishing industry came to an unexpected halt this morning
as the parties announced a settlement
that would see both sides cooperate
on online access to copyrighted books.
Google have agreed to pay 125 million in the settlement.
35.5 million of that sum will go towards the establishment
of a rights collecting body for digital books.
whose copyrighted books Google has already scanned.
They will get around 60 per book.
The largest portion of the settlement, 45.5 million,
will go just on the legal fees.
But the most striking aspect of the agreement
is that it turns Google into a book seller, selling online access
to out-of-print but still-in-copyright works.
books google and tktktk settlement computer history museum speaker For those of you who don't know the
details of the settlement agreement,
it's 385 pages,
it has 46 sections of definitions,
it's got 15 sections on Google's obligations,
it's got nine sections on the economic terms,
it's got six sections on libraries' obligations.
So this is not a little three-or-four
page memorandum of understanding
that we are talking about here.
This is a very heavily-negotiated agreement.
So how many people have not read the 334 pages?
OK.
Gleick We proposed something that was a little bit outside the box
and that was - if money is being made,
share the money with the rights holders.
It couldn't be simpler.
So I thought it would be pretty non-controversial.
That apparently was naive of me.
Darnton I personally became increasingly disenchanted
with what originally looked like a great idea.
They basically transformed the search service
into a gigantic commercial enterprise.
They really thought they would digitise every book in existence
and make it available, for a price, everywhere.
Samuelson The settlement would allow Google to have essentially a licence to commercialize all books that are out of print.
There were certainly hundreds of thousands
and probably millions of books,
for whom, even if they were in copyright,
no author, no publisher, no rights holder would come forward.
And those books are orphans
and Google would be able to commercialize those
and nobody else would.
Darnton A monopoly was being created,
a monopoly of access to knowledge.
Did we want the greatest library that would ever exist
to be in the hands of one giant corporation,
which could really charge almost anything it wanted for access to it?
Samuelson It's not a library, it's a bookstore
and, you know, sell it as a bookstore, if you want,
but don't pretend that it's a library.
Dan Clancy? When I talk to people in the publishing industry,
they find it humorous cos it's like,
"Well, they're orphan for a reason..."
And that in fact if we suddenly found this goldmine
where the future of the book
are the orphan books... -Yeah.
..OK, then, boy, those publishers sure aren't very smart.
Paul Misener, VP Amazon Our principal concern here today in this discussion
is that, under the proposed settlement,
Google would be the only entity that could treat copyright
as an opt-out mechanism.
Everyone else would have to treat it as opt-in.
There are other problems with this proposed settlement.
Charles A. Gonzalez Listed below are various potential revenue streams for Google
as identified within the settlement -
institutional subscriptions,
consumer purchases, advertising uses, public access service,
print-on-demand, custom publishing,
PDF downloads, consumer subscription model,
summaries, abstracts, compilations of books.
That's what you are going to end up with at a minimum.
What I'm saying to you, Mr Drummond,
does this, in fact, place Google at such a tremendous advantage
in disregard of what has been historically copyright law?
How do you respond to those concerns?
David C. Drummond, Google As of today, we have zero market share in any sort of books,
so we're a new entrant to the market.
So far from being someone who's controlling the market,
we're not even in it yet and we're trying to get in there.
Samuelson They thought, "All we have to do is
kind of announce this to the world
"and the world will go, 'God, what a great agreement!'"
And, for a while, some people did.
But then, you started reading the agreement really carefully
and there were lots of questions.
The problem was there was nothing in the agreement
that respected the privacy of the people
who were looking at the books.
Google was going to be keeping track
of who exactly was reading that book,
how long they were reading it and what they read next.
That information could get back to the government,
could get back to the FBI, could get back to the police,
could get back to their employer.
Because Google wasn't making any kind of guarantees
about what they were going to do in respect of this privacy.
Kevin Kelly If people find that the privacy policies of a particular technology are not to their liking, they should unplug it.
They should retreat from the Internet.
They should cut off their phone lines
and they should go up and hide in a mountain.
They have that choice.
WB Rayward Well's conception of the World Brain was that
it was intended to have a power of surveillance over mankind -
information gathered and organised in such a way
that we had an eye that could actually survey
everything that was going on.
It would be able to register where everybody was,
everywhere they went, potentially, all the transactions that they were engaged in.
And he seemed to think this is likely to be a good thing.
Darnton It was a gradual process of getting to know the details of Google Book Search and it was the cumulative effect of these details
that made me feel this project was, actually,
something that I myself could not recommend
to the president and fellows of Harvard
as something that we should enthusiastically support.
Rayward HG Wells' idea of the World Brain
was a dictatorship of technologists and intellectuals.
These are the geeks of their day
and, gradually, he saw their power would spread
from laboratory to laboratory, from university to university,
as these people with the expertise began to coalesce
into sort of almost like managerial groups
that would mean that we don't need the politicians
and the conflicts and the noise, the confusion, the babble.
But for the World Brain there was to be a further component
and this is the component that is what disturbs me.
It's how that would be used to achieve the ultimate goals of civilisation, as it appears to have been evolving towards.

 

It's going to change how we interface with information.
People are going to ask, "How did it do that?
"How did it accomplish this task
"which before we thought only humans could ever hope to do?"

narrator David Hume held this view
that sense and experience are the sole foundation of knowledge.
Watson?
What is empiricism?

Clay Shirky After IBM's success with Deep Blue,
they looked around for other kinds
of games that they could take on.
And they wanted something
that was a very different kind of game than chess.
And so, they picked Jeopardy!,
which is basically a fancy trivia game,
it's one of those games that you or I could play.
unknown It's a human standing there with their carbon and water
versus the computer with all of its silicon
and its main memory and its disk.
Trebek After Germany invaded the Netherlands,
this Queen, her family and cabinet fled to London. Maria?
Who is Beatrice?
No, Watson?
Who is Wilhelmina?
That is correct.
This US President negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth
ending the Russo-Japanese War.
Watson?
Who is Theodore Roosevelt?
Good for 800...
Kevin Kelly I did talk to Larry Page when Google first started
because I was really perplexed
about why would anybody make a new search engine
when we had AltaVista,
which was the current search engine.
It seemed good enough.
And he said, "Oh, it's not to make
a search engine, it's to make an AI."
Ray Kurzweil Most of my discussions have been with Larry Page.
We've talked in general about their quest
to digitise all knowledge
and then develop "true AI."
You can create intelligent systems if you have very large databases.
And books are actually probably more valuable
than all the other stuff on the Internet,
cos we have a high standard for what we put in books.
The computer industry and its implications
in terms of information technology
is a multi-trillion-dollar part of the economy.
It will be, you know, the basis of everything we do in the future.
Shirky What Watson showed was you can take
a very large, very messy set of data
and if you can use those inputs correctly,
you can actually answer really sophisticated questions.
And, certainly, the presence of large amounts of data on the Internet
is going to be as much an input for machines as it is for people.
Kurzweil What we really will need to top that
is computer systems that can understand natural language.
And natural language understanding is actually coming along very well. IBM's Watson is a very good example of the current state of the art in computers understanding natural language,
cos not only did Watson have to understand
the convoluted language in the Jeopardy! query,
which includes metaphors and similes
and puns, and riddles and jokes,
but it got its knowledge to respond to the query
from actually reading 200 million
pages of natural-language documents,
including all of Wikipedia, and several other encyclopaedias.
Shirky And when you see a computer play it better than we ever could, it's one of those moments where you realise,
"Oh, yes, the world really is different."
News reporter An IBM supercomputer named Watson
has won the first ever Jeopardy! quiz show competition
starring a computer as a player.
Kelly Google Book Project is, in a sense, trying to make that universal library which could then be read by an AI or a Watson-like supercomputer.
Kurzweil By 2045, we'll have expanded, according to my calculations, the intelligence and capability of the human machine civilisation a billion fold. So that's such a profound transformation,
such a singular transformation, that we call it the singularity.
[holds up phone] Now, this is not yet inside my body or brain.
It may as well be. I'm very dependent on it.
I think this is part of who I am.
Ultimately, this kind of device will be the size of blood cells
and will go inside our body to keep us healthy,
go inside our brains, put our brains directly on the Internet,
give us direct access to the entire library of all books.
Lanier AI is just a religion. It doesn't matter.
What's really happening is real world examples from real people
who entered their answers, their trivia,
their experiences into some online database.
It's actually just a giant puppet?? theatre repackaging
inputs from real people who are forgotten.
We are pretending they aren't there.
This is something I really want people to see.
The insane structure of modern finance is exactly
the same as the insane structure
of modern culture on the Internet.
They're precisely the same.
It's an attempt to gather all the information into a high castle,
optimise the world and pretend that
all the people the information came
from don't deserve anything. It's all the same mistake.
Amit Singhal Google Search is going to be assisted intelligence
and not artificial intelligence.
In my mind I think of Search as this beautiful symphony
between the user and the search engine
and we make music together.

[Kafka reference

Orson Welles Before the law, there stands a guard.
A man comes from the country begging admittance to the law.

German R. R. small step from Kafka to Google Books

 

The man tries to peer through the entrance.
He had been taught that the law should be accessible to every man.
"Do not attempt to enter without my permission," says the guard.
This tale is told during the story called The Trial.
Sergey Brin I've been surprised at the level of controversy there
because digitising the world's books and making them available,
there's really... there's nobody else who's attempted it at our scale
or who is really working on it.
And I feel like we had a number of technical challenges
which we've overcome.
There was this legal dispute which we have a settlement,
settlements proposed, that we at least jointly agree to with
the authors and publishers and so forth but it remains somewhat
controversial, so I'm surprised at the amount of resistance that's had
but, ultimately, I'm optimistic that we're going to be successful.

 

this is where we cut off in class

now the settlement has been overthrown

It's important to understand that the Google Books element was
negotiated by a small number of people claiming to represent
authors and claiming to represent publishers,
but not every author and not every publisher was in the room
so once the settlement's announced, there's a six-month period
in which it's required to notify them
about the terms of the settlement
and give them a chance to opt out if they don't like the settlement
or to give them a chance to object to the terms of the settlement.
The first time I realised Google
scanned my book was 2009, November.
Actually my lawyer called me
and he said, "Do you know your book
be scanned by Google Book?"
The search engine Google came under
intense fire from Chinese authors
as the digital library used books written by Chinese authors
without permission.
The reader, they can search my book
by the keyword and maybe around
is 'bed', B-E-D, and 'telephone'.
That's two words I remember and that made me laugh.
This is not intellectual at all.
Me and my lawyer decide to sue Google.
My lawyer asked 60,000, something like that.
My journalist friends said, "I don't want to help you but I know you.
"Why you ask such low money?" so I wrote this blog that night.
When I wake up, it's, like, 400 messages at my blog saying,
"Damage this girl," and, "This girl's a bitch."
Blah blah blah. Really disgusting, horrible messages.
I become a public enemy after Google say they will leave China.
Also, Chinese young people started sending flowers to the Google office
which has made even my best friend be confused.
She say, "Is the government sending you to sue Google?"
Before the court is the plaintiff's motion to approve
the settlement as fair and reasonable.
Numerous materials have been submitted.
Did anyone count up the number of objections?
- We have in the range of 500.
- Thank you.
I flew to New York and it was very exciting.
There were 25 outside parties that
made presentations to Judge Chin.
There were 500 objections for him to read.
The judge basically said, "I'm not going to rule from the bench,"
but people were hanging on every word.
This is a fascinating turning point actually in the whole history of
knowledge and of access to knowledge
and it was being played out in a New York courtroom
before Judge Denny Chin
in the Southern Federal District Court of New York.
I confirm that one of my books
has been digitally scanned by Google
without my permission.
Because this act is a clear violation of the copyright
law of Japan, I have asked the Metropolitan Police Department
of Japan to criminally charge Google
and its CEO for this violation.
The court's decision was to a considerable extent going to
determine the future of books, of digital books.
The proposed settlement results in
a de facto monopoly on information
and an intensification of media concentration on Google.
As a result, the right of free access to information,
as well as the existing cultural
diversity in both Germany and Europe
will be usurped.
Would it be basically in the hands of commercial speculators,
whose responsibility was to their shareholders
or would it be organised for the public good?
There was a risk of monopolisation there,
that the Department of Justice saw.
The proposed settlement would establish a marketplace
in which only one competitor
would have authority to use a vast array of works.
The risk was that Google could basically hold the whole
world hostage to the price of access to these books
and, because no-one else would have a licence,
no-one else would have a corpus like the corpus they had,
we'd have to pay whatever they wanted to charge.
The core concerns seem to be that this would diminish
the availability to read books in private.
That is not true. This service
would be available at public libraries.
You can walk into your neighbourhood library, you can sit down at
a free access terminal, anonymously.
You can search for and read a book.
And if you want to look at it at home, then what?
Well, if you want to look at it at home, that may present an issue.
Here's the rub.
This is a tension between requirements for security
that are insisted on in order not to have these works be
sort of freely disseminated.
In my view, the Google Book Search
settlement is no different from the
piracy cases in which the Internet
and digital technology are abused.
I strongly urge the court to reject the proposed settlement.
I remember there being a Japanese writer there
and the language was very vivid.
It was as though, you know,
copyright was going to be swept away,
and that copyright was going to be
destroyed and the approval of this
settlement was going to, you know,
make the United States out of compliance with treaty obligations.
There's a real risk that, should the court approve the settlement,
members of the World Trade Organisation will initiate
settlement proceedings against the US government.
And if the US government were to lose such proceedings,
which is a very real possibility, our partners would be
entitled to impose trade sanctions against the United States.
You don't use words like that very often.
It wasn't kind of like, "Oh, gee, there are these issues
"and we're concerned about something."
It was like, "THIS VIOLATES A TREATY!
"HOW CAN THE JUDGE DO SOMETHING
THAT'S GOING TO VIOLATE A TREATY?
"THIS IS CRAZY!"
I am not going to rule today.
There is just too much to digest. I will reserve decision.
There's much to think about.
- All rise.
And then Judge Chin thought about it.
He thought about it and he thought about it.
He took a very long time and every morning I got up and I thought,
"Is Judge Chin going to announce his decision today?"
And when he finally did, I myself felt thrilled
because the court actually refused to sanction the settlement.
Then Google Book Search could not take place, at least according
to Google's original business plan.
US circuit judge Denny Chin said the creation of a universal library
would benefit many but would simply go too far.
Chin said the settlement of a class action law suit that the
company reached with US authors
and publishers would grant Google
significant rights to exploit entire books
without permission of copyright owners.
Chin also said the deal gives Google a significant advantage over
competitors and it would be rewarding it for engaging in
wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission.
I think you could read the decision by Judge Chin as a defeat
of the screen by the book.
But this is a long war.
This is one battle and,
whatever triumph there might have been for books,
it's going to be short-lived,
because the screen will ultimately triumph.
They spent several months trying to negotiate a new settlement,
couldn't reach a new settlement that was mutually acceptable,
so they're going to have to go to trial.
'Baidu, China's search engine giant, has been blamed by Chinese
'writers for participating in copyright violation.
'This is because the website offers free online excerpts of stories
'and books without the authors' prior approval.'
I think very late March or early April of 2011,
we purged the site of about 2.8 million files that we believed
might be copyright infringing within a period of 72 hours.
I think a good number of them were books or chapters of books.
We implemented a rule where
no-one could upload anything of more
than 1,000 Chinese characters without it being manually inspected
for copyright infringement
or automatically inspected for copyright infringement.
The problem is then people started uploading parts of books
in 1,000-character increments so they would avoid detection.
So there's always people who want to abuse the system.
The question is,
has Google already been able to
make its search engine better because
of the Google Books corpus and the scanning of 20 million books?
I think the answer to that is yes.
The question of whether large Internet
companies are making our lives easier or gaining power over us,
I think it presents a kind of false binary because they're doing both.
If they were not making our lives easier,
no-one would be using their services.
This is the tricky, complicated question
that we'll have to face down the road.
All of them are making our lives easier.
They're making products cheaper.
They're making our commute less bothersome and more exciting.
Google will be supplying us with glasses that will augment reality
and tell us about where our friends are in the city.
They'll tell us the weather. They'll tell us everything.
The question is what would the trade-offs be?
What happens with all of the information that would pass
through Google Glasses? Surely it will be stored somewhere.
I'm sure Google will not be discarding it because they will
need to know what it is that I've seen yesterday
so that they can customise what I see today even better.
But then the question is, would the
National Security Agency be able to
go to Google and ask for that data?
Ask for everything I've seen through my Google Glasses?
And if that would be the case then the question should be
do we actually want to have a society where citizens are wearing
CCTV cameras on their heads?
Getting to a better system where people are rewarded
for their information contribution
to the world, getting to that system
from where we are, where people are expected to get by with less,
that's going to be a hard transition.
They might involve government but they might involve the big companies
and the reason why is the big companies like Google and Amazon
are shooting themselves in the foot with what we're doing
because what we're doing is shrinking the economy. I mean...
My concern is not so much the direction in which Google,
Facebook for that matter, want to take the world.
My concern is the fact
that it's Google and Facebook taking us in that direction.
Our current policy to open up the library and make it part of this
really very ambitious project,
more ambitious I think than Google's,
which we call the Digital Public Library of America.
You know, I think that we owe a great deal to Google.
I can't imagine that this Digital Public Library of America
would ever have gotten off the ground had Google not started to
race ahead with its own version of
digitization on this massive scale.
However, you know, Google, wonderful as it is,
is not familiar with books.
For example, Walt Whitman's famous book of poems, Leaves Of Grass,
was catalogued under gardening.
We are designing the Digital Public Library of America
so that it will be perfectly compatible with Europeana
and that means soon we will have a worldwide network.
A gigantic world library.
HG Wells' view of science and technology was what sustained him
and sustained his ideas throughout his whole life.
He had this sense that, if only we could get the scientists and the
technologists working in the right way,
we could transform the world
and he continued with that belief up until
the absolute final disillusionment with the entire human world.
It was a book which he called, so fittingly,
Mind At The End Of Its Tether.
He felt that the whole evolutionary
process that he had been studying
and he felt was leading us to something new and wonderful,
had failed.
And his last words were that there was
no way out or round or through.
Our world of self-delusion will perish amidst its evasions
and fortuities.
It is like a convoy lost in darkness along an unknown rocky coast
with quarrelling pirates in the
chart room and savages clambering up
the sides of the ship to plunder
and do evil as the whim may take them.
That is the rough outline of the more
and more jumbled movie on the screen before us.
There is no way out.
Or round.
Or through.
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the broader arguments are rooted in ideologies AI-->closer to God?!?!?

MT: could look at the way in which religion is invoked to substantiate commercial

Kevin Kelley: article about two types of generativity

Project Gutenberg
snippets are an even more extreme type of fragmentation
Niva Elkin-Koren and how a snippet may be sufficient for the searcher, and then no one buys/reads the book-->loss of context
Lovink: "Maybe we shouldn't call it a book anymore." collectively decide on a new unit

Stephen: the folks we discussed yesterday falling back on conservative argument-->defense of the sovereignty of the book; cogent approach is difficult in terms of activism bc have to balance progressive and conservative forms of rhetoric
Roderic: they are arguing for continuity, so the presence of new things doesn't change what a book is; how do these circulate in different ways?
S: "the book becomes a metanym for the author"
R: distinction bt scholarly and popular books
MT: access to the book, versus access to the knowledge?
Stephanie Sherman: Star Trek as the model?!?
super-reductive fantasies of talking computers; viability of public access and production
would have the same critiques were it the state doing this?
MT: control of the knowledge by one entity
fear of a third totalitarian system
distributed knowledge-->like bitTorrent
what if universities functioned like that?