
The Tragedy of Google Books: Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria - ag8
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/
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bloak
I followed this story a bit as it happened. This seems like a good
retrospective summary. It is a tragedy that we can't have access to at least
some of those books. What's needed is a major change in international
copyright law, but that would be a very difficult thing to achieve while
legislators have almost no interest in the matter, other than occasionally
extending copyright when asked to do so by Disney and co.

Obviously you can't change international copyright law by means of a civil
action between a US-based "ad slinger" (as theregister.co.uk calls it) and
some private writers' association.

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fractalf
I personally wouldn't call it a tragedy. No way google did this to "serve
humanity", they see a way to make money on this. 10-20 years down this road,
and the only way to access this knownledge would be to subscribe to some
service.

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ag8
Yeah, the article discusses this point a lot—the argument in favour being
that's it's better to have _some_ imperfect access to out-of-print books than
none at all. But yes, your point is ultimately a big part of why the project
didn't happen

