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Google book scanning: Cultural theft or freedom of information?

February 8, 2010 - 12:57pm — Blake

Google book scanning: Cultural theft or freedom of information?
A proposed partnership between the French government and Google is stoking fears in France that the country's literary treasures will fall under commercial control of a U.S. technology company.

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February 8, 2010 - 8:52pm — Anonymous

Life is full of trade-offs, no?

I remember headlines in 2005 where the president of Bibliothèque nationale de France was concerned that the Google Books project would become the de facto digitized library, with a heavy bias to American and other English language material.

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February 9, 2010 - 10:23am — Pbedorah

Global Information Ownership

So it looks like we are back to the question of who owns information, from what I could tell regarding this article Google is only scanning books that no longer fall under copyright restrictions. I also have to ask myself, isn't it a writer's greatest dream that their information will be used by as many people as possible? The French minister appears to live in a contracted world of yours and mine, I appreciated the librarian's open response, personally I don't care who gets the digital information out there I just want to be able to access it!

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February 9, 2010 - 12:11pm — Walt

True only in Europe

"Google is only scanning books that no longer fall under copyright restrictions." True for their current European projects, apparently--but absolutely not true in the U.S. Otherwise, there would be no hotly-argued Google Books Proposed Settlement, since there would be nothing to settle.

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