It wasn’t just Russ, with his exobrain…

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13 October

Google and the World-Brain (2013) gave me a first notion – I believe – of what H. G. Wells looked and sounded like, a man so set upon technological development that he seemed almost blind to morals, with what he conceived as The World-Brain, and relatively dismissive of human worth when all that we needed was a big machine to determine what we should do

There the comparisons with Google Books have to end. However, as I find myself having mentioned in connection with reviewing The Taste of Money (2013), nothing in this documentary made clear how Google Books persuaded some libraries to allow it to scan works still in copyright, whether the libraries received a fee, or why anyone was so blind – into many millions of such scans – that anyone’s rights (the copyright-holder’s) were being infringed. And so, when the copyright-holders found out, and brought class-actions in the States (and in other jurisdictions), the whole question had first come before a US judge.

When I asked Ben Lewis, the film’s director, in the Q&A, did Google Books do as it did, did he think, to present the world with a fait accompli, he did not appear to disagree. Are things as they should be, in pursuit of some well-meaning higher ideal, if people’s statutory rights are compromised, because this case has highlighted the issue – and since people now, other than Google Books (some of whose scans were actually or virtually worthless on account of the quality), are scanning works in the aim of information-sharing on a global scale, but more linked to the libraries (rather than, say, selling print-on-demand copies made from scans) ?

All that I say about the idea of reading everything into a machine is largely this : read Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel, a story about a seemingly infinite library in which Borges foresaw the problems of the Internet, i.e. that it may be there, but, amongst everything else, how does one find it ?

And, also from that story, does the sum of all printed writing actually achieve beyond (although worthwhile in themselves) accessibility, and the prevention of a devastation such as occurred with The Library of Alexandria ? If Plato writes x is true, and then Aristotle writes y is true, where the two statements are inconsistent, what possible software can construe what each writer – in the original Greek text, which we do not have, only later copies – meant and what it – and we – should ‘think’ ? How construe, then, a writer whose work survives in fragments, such as Heraclitus ?

As vain a dream as The Singularity, which the film touched momentarily on, and for which there has been the sort of special pleading usually reserved to criticizing (or making) the claims of religion. (Some may judge that my personal view is closest to that of Internet analyst Evgeny Morozov, who also appeared in the film, and, when edited appropriately (which was lacking on one or two occasions), was able to make some very relevant points.)

This, though, is not just a documentary about books, words, but those in the field who work with printed materials and who have been affected by what happened :

* Calm director of the library at Harvard (Robert Darnton) and the former director of The Bodleian Library (Reginald Carr) – neither, as I recall, said they allowed copyright books to be scanned

* A slightly more excited US lawyer (Mary Sue Coleman, who is the President of Michigan University), who informed us about the progress of the case

* An impassioned Frenchman (Jean-Noël Jeanneney, who, at the time of the events that he relates, when Google Books made an overture, was director of La Bibliothèque Nationale Française, and started the counteroffensive)

* A knowledgeable and uncompromising German scholar (Roland Reuss, Professor of German Literature at the University of Heidelberg), insistent that what Google Books had done was wrong

Plus the people at Google itself (not Google Books, except for a very short clip of Luis Collado, Head of Google Books in Spain and Portugal), such as Sergey Brin and David Drummond, who talked about worthy aims in a somewhat too enthusiastic way to be aware of real-world limitations (see above)…

A film that informed me, and made me reflect. Most of all, I wondered at Google Books, breaking faith with all those people who believed in copyright law, and a judge who might, in his final ruling, determine that those whose rights were ignored are fixed with a bargain that is likely to affect not just them, but the whole world of copyright.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)