Google Watch

In a rare interview, Sergey Brin talked to Alan Murray about Google Library in the Wall Street Journal:

There was a time when folks thought compelling content would be king of the Internet. Attract enough “eyeballs,” the gurus said, and money would follow. But instead, Google’s blank home page has trumped all. The Google economy is a kind of high-tech feudal system: The peasants produce the content; Google makes the profits.
That’s all the more annoying to the content crowd because the lords of this money machine — Sergey Brin and Larry Page — perpetuate the goofy-sounding notion that they do all this to help the world, rather than line their own pockets.
“That’s true,” Mr. Brin said in an interview yesterday. “We talked at Stanford for a while about making Google an open-source project. We ultimately decided that would not be an efficient way for us to get the resources we needed to make it run. So we started a company.”
As for the Google Print Library Project, Mr. Brin says, “We actually dreamed of the ability to do this back before we started Google as a company.” It is good for Google’s users, good for the business, it’s fair and it’s legal, he says. “But more importantly, I think it is really great for the world.”
The publishers may find Mr. Brin annoying. And he certainly is successful and rich. But he also happens to be right. The Google Print Library Project is great for the world.

The problem is that Google wants to include all material unless a particular author opts out. The publishers want everything to be excluded, unless the authors opt in. It seems very unreasonable to me that an author has to work to protect his or her copyright. If it’s so great for the world, then it should be worth paying for.

Posted by on October 26th, 2005 at 8:35 am


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