and in that respect, the truth, the whole truth has just caught up with nick davis. we will see you next time here at "the listening post." ♪ >> there is no practical obstacle whatever now to the

creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements. to the creation that is of a complete planetary memory for all mankind. >> he was one of the early inventors of science fiction, the idea of time travel, the possibility of invisibility, of intergalactic struggles and then he came up with ideas of how we might reorganize the knowledge apparatus of the world, which he called the world brain. for wells, the world brain had to contain all that was learnt and known and that was being learnt and known. >> they were frank in their ambition and dazzling in their

ability to execute it. >> the google books scanning project is clearly the most ambitious world brain scheme that has ever been invented. >> the nightmare scenario in 20 year's time would be google tracking everything you read. >> google could basically hold the whole world hostage. >> this is no remote dream, no fantasy. it is a plain statement of a contemporary state of affairs.

>> it's a library, a public library, where people go to look at books, and read them and take them away. that girl works at the library and she checks on books that are going out and books that are coming back in >> i love libraries ... i like the smell...the smell of paper properly preserved, it's as if it's the smell of a hay barn that's been cleared of all its animals and made into a human intelligence >> and in a library, you really...even if you're sitting in the tearoom, discussing your latest findings it's amazing how much social interaction with other people will actually help you to enrich what you're doing. >> in this part of the library, the grown ups can read the stories to the children... >> people sometimes say to me, aren't libraries obsolete? it's... ..it's absurd ...they are nerve centers - centers of intellectual energy.

>> the first appeal of google's enterprise, when we saw it, was just digitizing millions and millions of books. at harvard we have by far the greatest university library in the world. its enormous - 17 million volumes and every library wants its holdings digitized for lots for reasons, including preservation. but beyond that it raises the possibility of sharing your intellectual wealth. so here comes google. they've got the energy they've got the technology, they've got the money and they said: we will do it for you. free >> about 10 years ago, i got a visit from a vice president of

google. and she walked into my office and described a project that google had in mind, which was to digitize all the books in the harvard library. my first thought was - to put it bluntly that maybe they were smoking something, because i didn't think it was possible. >> when you actually negotiate with google...umm.. and do so on their turf, you enter a strange world. a google office doesn't have chairs like this chair. the furniture consists of large inflated balls that are colored green or red or yellow and the young google engineers are sitting on these. it's a kind of never-never land feeling. >> google is a company that believes in its fundamental mission of empowering everyone in this world with all the

information they need. from a farmer in africa to a mother in india to a business person in japan, everyone needs information in this modern day and age. and google believes in breaking all the barrier between every individual and the information they seek. >> one of the things that you need to understand about google is that they try to roll out projects first and then to think about the consequences later. so you will often see them experiment with something that looks very cool. it may be the google street view project. >> google launched street view in 2007, part of the search engine's long term goal to create a 3d map of the whole planet right down to street level. but investigations have revealed that google's street view cars were collecting more than just photographs for their databanks. their antennas were also hovering up personal information from unprotected wifi networks including internet history and passwords.

>> i think the case of google collecting wi-fi information....it reveals a complete lack of respect for privacy within the corporation, such projects often reveal that google does not fully understand the social consequences of its own work. >> google did such a fabulous job in creating a vision, not only that a universal digital library could be created but that it could be done today. the google engineers are like good engineers everywhere. they just like to think about 'how do we.. how do we surmount these challenges?' they sort of leave the lawsuit to the lawyers to worry about.

>> i went to google in january 2003. i actually made, what now i feel quite embarrassed about i made a presentation to them, telling them what they ought to be doing. only to find out a few months later that they'd actually been doing it for a

while already. "project ocean" was the kind of code name, development code name that google were giving to what eventually became google books. so it was called project ocean because it was big, i imagine. google seemed to think that they could do almost a million in 3 years.

>> google were and are free to do what they want with the scans. and why should that concern us? i mean part of our ethos and part of our objective as a library is to make the information that is contained in our library available as free of

charge as we can possibly make it to anybody who needs it. and if google is going to do that on a larger scale, that's fine. if they are going to make money out of it down the line, why not? you know, they have invested a lot of money in it. there is no such thing as a free lunch. >> i wanted to be in on the big >> many of these involved

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which might be the greatest power on earth for the good of mankind >> we started the internet archive in 1996. the idea was to have all the published works of human kind available to everybody, that this was the opportunity of our generation, that like the previous generation had put a man on the moon. the internet archive had been completely open with google. in fact i'd gone and given a speech that was attended by i think all of the senior executives on how one could go about building a digital library of all books, music, video, and i'd hoped that there was going to be a way to work with them, but that was not be. libraries had signed secret agreements with google - we didn't know what was really going on. when it started coming out as a completely separate project, not working with

others, then i started to become suspicious. >> you could say that this mass digitization is something like running a huge machine through a library. you take books by the shelf. they are put in cartons, on carts. they are loaded onto trucks. and then google at this time had 3 places in the country where it was doing digitization. supposedly it didn't give the address of where they were.

>> google won't say how much scanning all the books cost. but there are estimates that you know it well...it's somewhere between 30 and 100 dollars per book, so if you multiply that times 20 million. >> google, early on bent over backwards to keep us from communicating with the other libraries. there were 3 or 4 large ones and each of us was told we should not tell the others what kind of a contract we had and how we were working with google. >> we actually do more search queries in china alone than any other search company does in any other single national market, by which i really mean google in the united states. so we certainly do aspire to be a world brain... i think hg wells was, i mean he is well known for having been quite

prescient about a lot of the things he envisaged. sure we don't have the time machine yet, but pretty much the rest of it was dead on. we have a product, which is a very, very popular product, it's called "baidu wenku", the chinese name of it is the baidu library. it allows people to upload materials that they have that are either of their own creation, or that they have the... the intellectual property rights to, to our site.

>> some of the enthusiasts for google's way of gathering data - and its not just google at all, i mean, its silicon valley in general. it's the current cultural moment. it includes the other silicon valley companies, but also the modern world of finance and also the modern world of spy craft for states, and also the modern world of criminality, and the modern world of insurance and health care - all these things have this idea, that you grab all this data in order to become very powerful you create a differential in your ability to see information versus an ordinary person. and you create these new incredible castles of power. but it's okay, it not just traditional power-mongering because you are 'making the world more efficient'. >> shortly after the launch of google books, at different events i ran into larry page and sergey brin and had this brief

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>> i don't think that google is aware of the fact that it is corporation. i think google does think of itself as an ngo that just happens to make a lot of money. and they think of themselves as social reformers who just happen to have their stock traded on stock exchanges, and who just happen to have investors and shareholders. but they do think of themselves as ultimately being in the business of making the world better. >> at harvard we only permitted google to digitize books in the public domain but the other research libraries, that google first went to, permitted google to digitize books covered by

copyright. as soon as you get into the copyright area things get rapidly complicated. >> we're allowing google to scan all of our books, those in the public domain and those still in copyright. we believe it is legal, ethical and a noble endeavor that will transform our society. legal because we believe copyright law allows us fair use of the millions of books that are being digitized. fair use is a piece of american copyright law that allows us to make copies without ever asking any permission, without paying any fee for certain carved out uses. >> i happen to think that google's fair use defense is strong one of the things that courts have done, over the last decade or so, is decided, that search engines, who routinely make

copies of information, are making fair uses when they do it in order to help people find information that they are looking for. >> first we learned that google was scanning books and i remember loving the idea because i'm a reader and i write non-fiction books and i do research and i wanted access to those books. then we heard that they were scanning our books, they were scanning copyrighted books and they hadn't asked anyone's permission, the libraries had just handed them over. well...that was obviously a violation of our copyright and a little bit of a surprise to put it mildly. >> i remember being very curious about what they were doing and i

popped my name in google and saw that it came up with snippets of my books. so what i did was searched for terms that i knew were common in my book like "star, galaxy" and there were lots and lots of hits and it would display several snippets. and then i would search for other common words and it was clear that if you were clever with your searches you could see quite a bit of the text if not all of it. >> google claimed that it's use of these millions of copyrighted books that it digitized was an example of fair use. why i'm not sure. i still don't understand how that can be justified that point is that the entire book has been copied and it's been copied by a single company that's doing it for purposes of profiting off the work. if you allow a profit making

company to copy a million books, then how can you say no to the next enterprise that also wants to copy a million books. so the authors guild organized a class action suit, asking them to stop doing that. >> when google made its decision to scan these millions of books, it certainly realized, that depending upon how litigation developed, this could be a bet-the-company decision. because copyright liability in the united states can be quite extreme - $150,000 per copyrighted work. and, depending on the number of copyrighted works at stake, it could be in the billions of dollars. >> i think the issue of copyright is an archaic and unproductive view. when you create something you're building on the work of other people no matter who you are, whether you are jk rowling or shakespeare.

you're basing your work on the work of others. you're basically taking their ideas. an artist does not own their ideas. no artist does. >> any useful information exists because of the efforts of real people and copyright is our way of remembering who those people are. it's crucial to not lose that. and i think cyber culture is missing the point of copyright. you might say well who cares about authors, let a few authors not make as much money as they would have...but it's a precedent... the whole internet will become a tool for the concentration of power and that would be a disaster.