Google and copyright

So a deal has been reached….Google pays $$$ and everyone is happy….right? I was quizzed by a reporter yesterday who took some of what I said and ran with it here but the new agreement does contain within it an interesting note about allowing researchers from universities to query the resulting index (thanks to John Unsworth for bringing that to my attention). Naturally I remain somewhat suspicious of this whole project being under the control of a corporate entity whose aim is to organize the world’s information for us but I do have to acknowledge the sheer ambition of the project. No doubt there are more twists in this tale, especially since the news leaking out of Harvard is their library is sufficiently unhappy with the deal as to decline participation in the ‘in-copyright’ part of the book scanning project.