I was reading an interesting article yesterday by Bill Thompson on the BBC website regarding Google's plans to get hold of as many hard copy books as possible and scan them and 'digitise' them. All these books would then be made available in some form of database to customers like you and me. Would they be free? Unlikely. How would authors and publishers be remunerated? That is unclear. What is clear is that some people are convinced it is anti-competitive and some see it as breach of various copyrights. The US courts will decide and it is more than likely that we will see Google take the mantle of the worlds librarian.
Google have done a great job of creating sites and applications that harness other peoples content (yours and mine). We load up 'our' documents to GoogleDocuments. We can't save them with passwords. Interesting. This blog I am writing is all linked to Google. Gmail is packed full of documents sent by and to the user. Google Calendar lists where the user is going and where they have been. GoogleFriends? I haven't used this yet, but I will be shortly to link everyone to this blog. If you start to think about it, Google have access to a HUGE amount of user content and it goes so much further – private data. Do you trust them? Will they use the content wrongly? What would constitute wrongful use? I am drafting my thoughts.
