In the age of Wikipedia, Google, UrbanDictionary and Facebook, so much knowledge is available through one portal: the Internet, the largest library in the world.
But sometimes individual sites try to create libraries of their own. Wikipedia is one big encyclopedia which contains information on various topics we may encounter in our lives (not really everything but any topic you can think of, you can find on Wikipedia). Facebook is trying to network everyone on this planet and to have them all united under one single social network. Google’s search engine is a directory of almost all Web pages which exist.
Although this information seems like a lot, there is still much more to be shared with the rest of the world, and Google realizes that. Google is currently planning to put millions of books online and create the world’s largest virtual library by 2010. In fact, this library would be the largest library of any kind in the world. Google started the project by scanning 10 million out-of-print books.
Unfortunately though, the service will not be free, in contrast to Wikipedia (my favorite general information source) which is 100 percent free. Google is going to charge people for the access to this new massive library.
For me, Google has been an innovator and a leader in modern information exchange. Google was the first to offer large inbox space of all big free e-mail providers. Google’s search engine is the most comprehensive, biggest and definitely the best in this era. Google Earth and Google Maps are two other great electronic innovations by Google.
But I was a little disappointed with Google’s virtual library project., because Google is digitizing (making a digital copy) literary works without asking the will of authors and publishers. A big company like Google can digitize works published by most European publishers without asking permission and definitely without paying the authors or the publishers.
Not just Europeans works but any work from South America, Asia, Africa and Australia is subject to being digitized by Google without any kind of reimbursement given to publishers or authors. What a sad story.
I know for sure some are trying to sue Google, but Google is still continuing to scan books in the meantime. While an agreement for the works published in the United States can be easily attainable for some sum of money, an agreement with foreign publishers seems unnecessary because law so far has not punished Google for what it is doing.
And, after a second thought, I cannot really blame Google for what it is doing. Google so far is trying not to break the laws especially copyright laws and it is doing well for so far. For example, French publishers have not been successful in making Google pay to digitize their work. In fact, Google’s approach to digitizing all books is a good approach in principal since it saves books from disappearing from the cultural landscape.
Google’s actions raises the awareness that laws need to be changed, especially those regarding international copyright laws. The United Nations should establish an international committee whose goal is to create one big global agency which protects copyrights in all international areas. So far, only regional agencies have been established, examples including one in Europe and one in the Arab region. It is necessary to create such an agency because now people can only get a patent copyright protection in the country where they got the patent. So I can steal someone’s else project from here and sell it in China, without being accused of any crime whatsoever.
What a sad story it is! Having one single organization would help the cause of democracy because it protects everyone’s rights. Nobody would be able to steal someone’s else music album, book or invention. It is only our duty as a global world to do this, to protect others rights and ours as well.
I would have respected Google more if it was providing the works for free because it attained most of them for free. Google better now hurry up in digitizing all the books before a global copyright law is established.
Abdallah Abu Ghazaleh is a freshman majoring in electrical engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].