SIVACRACY.NET

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

Last May, Kevin Kelly, Wired magazine’s “senior maverick,” published in The New York Times Magazine his predictive account of flux within the book-publishing world. Kelly outlined what he claimed will happen (not might or could — will) to the practices of writing and reading under a new regime fostered by Google’s plan to scan millions of books and offer searchable texts to Internet users.

“So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas?” Kelly wrote. “First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. . . . Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority . . . .”

Kelly saw the linkage of text to text, book to book, as the answer to the information gaps that have made the progress of knowledge such a hard climb. “If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject,” Kelly wrote, “then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.”

Such heady predictions of technological revolution have become so common, so accepted in our techno-fundamentalist culture, that even when John Updike criticized Kelly’s vision in an essay published a month later in The New York Times Book Review, he did not so much doubt Kelly’s vision of a universal digital library as lament it.

As it turns out, the move toward universal knowledge is not so easy. Google’s project, if it survives court challenges, would probably have modest effects on writing, reading, and publishing. For one thing, Kelly’s predictions depend on a part of the system he slights in his article: the copyright system. Copyright is not Kelly’s friend. He mentions it as a nuisance on the edge of his dream. To acknowledge that a lawyer-built system might trump an engineer-built system would have run counter to Kelly’s sermon.

Much of the press coverage of the Google project has missed some key facts: most libraries that are allowing Google to scan books are, so far, providing only books published before 1923 and thus already in the public domain, essentially missing most of the relevant and important books that scholars and researchers — not to mention casual readers — might want. Meanwhile, the current American copyright system will probably kill Google’s plan to scan the collections of the University of Michigan and the University of California system — the only libraries willing to offer Google works currently covered by copyright. In his article, Kelly breezed past the fact that the copyrighted works will be presented in a useless format — “snippets” that allow readers only glimpses into how a term is used in the text. Google users will not be able to read, copy, or print copyrighted works via Google. Google accepted that arrangement to limit its copyright liability. But the more “copyright friendly” the Google system is, the less user-friendly, and useful, it is. And even so it still may not fly in court.

Google is exploiting the instability of the copyright system in a digital age. The company’s struggle with publishers over its legal ability to pursue its project is the most interesting and perhaps most transformative conflict in the copyright wars. But there are many other battles — and many other significant stories — out in the copyright jungle. Yet reporters seem lost.