One of my students pointed me to a good read in the New Yorker on Google: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin. The subject of just what google might be up to has been an intriguing one for me recently, what with my own university joining the great digitization project and rumors circulating at recent conferences on the company’s purchases of dark fiber networks. Toobin makes the comment at the end of his article that “it’s folly to judge the company’s behavior on moral grounds. Its shareholders certainly don’t.” Is this really so? Are we not all stakeholders in this information space and don’t we have an interest in how access to the published work is controlled? Google’s corporate page contains several interesting quotes http://www.google.ca/corporate/index.html:
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
” As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page. This makes the advertising useful to you as well as to the advertiser placing it.”
Oh well, that’s alright then.
Google is clearly “appropriating” tons of content via this digitization project … giving people bazillions of additional reasons to visit their site and click on their links (and occasionally, their advertisers’ links). I think this is a job that needs to be done, and will be done sooner or later. But something of this scope with zero profit motive? That’s pretty hard to come by. “This literature digitization project is funded in part by your good friends at General Mills”.