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August 28, 2005

Google Wants It All

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Posted by Jim Ware

Today's New York Times carries an intriguing story about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's apparent anger that his own company's commitment to making all information available on the web includes information about him, of all people!

The story ("Google Anything, so Long as It's Not Google"), by Randall Stross, highlights Schmidt's refusal to speak to anyone from CNet after that firm published a story by reporter Elinor Mills, who simply used Google.com to compile everything she could about Schmidt.

Come on, Eric, you're basically a good guy. How can you be so inconsistent as to think that the transparency you've created for all the rest of us shouldn't apply to you too?

This isn't just a story about a truculent CEO, however. The issues raised here are critical to the future of intellectual property, copyrights, patents, and privacy. The story includes a rather chilling description of how Google is doing an end run around publishers and other copyright owners in its quest to digitize every book in print.

When publisher by publisher negotiations got too complex and messy, Google just went to Harvard, Stanford, and University of Michigan's research libraries and cut deals to digitize their entire inventories - while keeping a digital copy of it all for itself. Chances are that between them those three libraries have just about all the books in the world that matter.

I mean, I am all for having online access to all that content, but it appears the new mantra isn't "Information wants to be free," but rather "Google wants your content and will give it to whomever it wants to."

In my humble opinion, this little chapter in the evolution of the digital dimension has very major consequences for all of us who value the Web, depend on it for our livelihood, and want to see it grow in service of society, yet care about things like intellectual property rights, privacy, and getting rewarded for the information-based value we create.

What do you think? How can we balance the competing values of knowledge-sharing and privacy?

(this note is also posted at the Future of Work blog)

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