Google and the World Brain Storyville

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...

LAUGHTER

..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.

If you have access to anything that's been written,

not just theoretical access,

but like instant access next to your brain,

that changes your idea of who you are.

It can be reproduced exactly

and fully in Peru, China, Iceland,

Central Africa or wherever else.

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.

This is no remote dream, no fantasy.

It is a plain statement of a contemporary state of affairs.

The nightmare scenario, in 20 years' time,

would be Google tracking everything we read.

Google could basically hold the whole world hostage.

Ever since Wells,

science fiction is always about the possibility

that people won't really matter in the future.

And the plot is always about some heroic person

that either succeeds or doesn't succeed

in proving that people really matter after all.

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?

Um... It's... It's absurd -

they are nerve centres,

centres of intellectual energy.

Libraries stand for an ideal,

which is an educated public.

And to the degree that knowledge is power,

they also stand there for the idea

that power should be disseminated and not centralised.

The first appeal of Google's enterprise,

when we saw it, was just digitising millions and millions of books.

At Harvard, we have, by far,

the greatest university library in the world.

It's enormous - 17 million volumes.

And every library wants its holdings digitised

for lots for reasons, including preservation.

But, beyond that, it raises the possibility

of sharing your intellectual wealth.

I think of the Harvard Library as an international asset.

Something that should be opened up

and shared with the general population.

So here comes Google.

They've got the energy, they've got the technology,

they've got the money and they said, "We'll do it for you. Free!"

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 surmount these challenges?"

They sort of leave the lawsuit to the lawyers to worry about.

Google's a company that believes in its fundamental mission

of empowering everyone in this world

with all the information they need.

Enriched with the right information,

people can make better decisions for themselves,

their families and their communities.

This world is full of wonderful individuals

which have varied needs.

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 barriers

between every individual and the information they seek.

When you actually negotiate with Google

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 coloured green or red or yellow

and the young Google engineers are sitting on these.

It's a kind of Never Never Land feeling.

About ten 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 digitise

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.

Harvard had been digitising books from time to time,

but they were very limited in number and we didn't do many,

it was a very expensive and complicated project.

I don't remember exactly,

but it was several hundred dollars just for a single book.

But they had invented a copying station

that was a lot cheaper and easier to use,

that didn't damage the books

or, at least, went out of its way not to damage the books.

And it seemed to me that it had a lot of plausibility.

And so, we decided to... to give it a try.

Every great library did digitising, sometimes on a large scale,

our Open Collections Programme digitised 2.3 million pages.

I mean, that's big.

But nothing like as big as what Google attempted to do.

The sheer ambition of digitising everything.

In the ancient world, at the Library of Alexandria,

they copied rolls and tablets,

and attempted to copy all that was known.

And, eventually, the library was destroyed by Julius Caesar

and the loss of that library in Alexandria

was an international catastrophe.

The universal library's been talked about for millennia.

There's a kind of a continuity of development

and, you know, we mustn't forget the important role

that libraries and scholars have always made

for millennia of copying.

And then, you see, with the development of printing,

the multiplicity of texts,

the copying of original texts.

It was possible to think in the Renaissance

that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge

in a single room or a single institution.

Then, in the 19th century,

you have various suggestions in France and Belgium

that you can create a catalogue of everything.

What will come next is microfilm.

And so, you start finding huge microfilming projects.

And so, for us, the Google Project was a sort of a natural extension

of that process of development.

Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart, was the first digital library.

He started on the fourth of July, in early 1970s,

by going and typing the Declaration of Independence

so that everybody could have access to it.

Thousands of volunteers worked from all over the world

to go and build this.

He even had the idea that it ought to be possible

to download the entire library that he had created if you wanted that.

And I think it did act as a kind of example of something

that, later on, Google and others

took up in a much bigger, more extensive way.

My name is Raymond Kurzweil and I'm from Queens, New York.

'When I was 12, I became fascinated with pattern recognition.'

And, as a young teenager,

I did a project to teach computers how to recognise patterns in music.

I've built a computer

and, by feeding it certain relationships and music,

I was able to write music with it.

-Raymond, how old are you?

-I'm 17.

Do your parents know what you've been up to?

LAUGHTER

Recognising printed letters was a classical unsolved problem

in the field of pattern recognition.

And so, I created the first omni-font optical character recognition.

This was about 1975.

1978, we developed a commercial version.

And we talked about how you could ultimately scan all books

and all printed material.

'When automobiles came along first,

'they seemed likely to become a rich man's monopoly.

'They cost upward of a thousand pounds.

'Henry Ford altered all that.

'He put the poor man on the road.

'We want a Henry Ford today

'to modernise the distribution of knowledge,

'make good knowledge cheap and easy,

'in this still very ignorant, ill-educated,

'ill-served English-speaking world of ours,

'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 humankind

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 to 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,

and not working with others,

then, I started to become suspicious.

Larry Page, who founded Google with me,

first proposed that we digitise all books a decade ago,

when we were a fledgling start-up.

Five years later, in 2004,

Google Books was born.

Despite a number of important digitisation efforts to date,

none have been at a comparable scale,

simply because no-one else has chosen to invest the requisite resources.

If Google Books is successful, others will follow.

I don't think that Google is aware of the fact that it's a 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.

There are few more irreparable property losses

than vanished books.

Nature, politics and war have always been

the mortal enemies of written works.

Most recently, Hurricane Katrina dealt a blow

to the libraries of the Gulf Coast.

At Tulane University, the main library sat in nine feet of water.

In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge regime, in Cambodia,

decimated cultural institutions throughout the country.

Khmer Rouge fighters took over the National Library

throwing the books into the street, burning them,

while using the stacks as a pigsty.

Now, with Google, the University of Michigan is involved

in one of the most extensive preservation projects

in world history.

Google Books is a potent idea on a number of dimensions.

What I like about Google Books

is the idea of not losing books,

especially books that might be genuinely abandoned.

The idea of getting all that stuff online

is, of course, going to be a benefit,

so that, we have to love.

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.

HE CHUCKLES

Google seemed to think that they could do

almost a million in three years.

You could say that this mass digitisation

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 three places in the country

where it was doing digitisation.

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...

well, it's somewhere between 30 and 100 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 three or four 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.

To begin with, it had to be kept fairly quiet.

It was probably mid 2003 when I started to take the wraps off

in terms of this is going to be a possibility

that we might be working with Google.

I witnessed the scale of the operation and it was very impressive.

20 very large work stations

with very high-resolution cameras

sitting on top of a cradle

with very intense lights.

And, underneath, a lot of black boxes, which, presumably,

contained all of Google's algorithms

that makes Google search what it is.

And they uploaded that stuff straight to Mountain View,

straight from Oxford.

Google certainly depends on knowing more and more and more

for their algorithm to be better and better and better.

And this is the core of the way economics in this space now works.

They had a specific interest in having lots of things in Google

that would lead people to use Google

so they could make money by having advertisements there.

What are books? They are full of data

and so, the more data you have,

the more you can fine-tune your search technologies.

Some of the enthusiasts for Google's way of gathering data,

and it's not just Google at all, I mean,

it's Silicon Valley in general.

It's the current cultural moment

and 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 the ordinary person.

And you create these new incredible castles of power,

but it's OK, it's not just traditional power mongering,

because you're making the world more efficient.

I was a little boy in the '70s growing up in India,

watching re-runs of Star Trek on our family's black-and-white TV.

And from that, those times,

the picture of a Star Trek computer was deeply ingrained in my head.

As a little boy, I was just fascinated by the fact

that you can walk up to a computer and ask it,

"Computer, what's the atmosphere of that planet?"

That was just the most fascinating thing to a little boy

and, from that day on,

it was my dream to build that Star Trek computer.

Only later would I grow up and realise it's really hard,

because computers don't understand language.

And I went through this brief period of disbelief as a graduate student,

where I didn't think I would reach my dream in my lifetime.

But thanks to Google

and all the technologies that we have built here,

and what I see in the pipeline,

I'm closer to my dream than ever.

Um...

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's 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've invested a lot of money in it.

Um... There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Who wouldn't want to have all of the world's knowledge available

to everyone on the planet?

The problem is that Google, as an intermediary in this process,

has certain interests and has a certain agenda

that is not always transparent.

If you, in Silicon Valley, you have another job,

which is you're building this new life form

that's going to take over the world

and Google is providing the memories for its brain

or the other companies are providing the memories,

and this is something that's openly talked about.

It's all human knowledge in books and out of books

woven together into a single entity

that's accessible by anybody, anywhere in the world, any time.

And that "all knowledge" is transformative.

It really kicks up the civilisation in our society into another level.

Shortly after the launch of Google Books,

in different events, I ran into Larry Page and Sergey Brin

and had this brief exchange with them about the potential.

And, you know,

there was a characteristic Google-founder response,

which was a kind of glint in their eyes and a smile

and the sense that this was just the beginning

of something much bigger than even you at this point can imagine.

At Harvard, we only permitted Google

to digitise books in the public domain,

but the other research libraries that Google first went to

permitted Google to digitise 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 endeavour that will transform our society.

Legal because we believe copyright law allows us fair use

of the millions of books that are being digitised.

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 Google's fair use defence 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.

One of the things Google has done is provide links

to places where you can buy the book.

They scanned, but they did not release the copy.

You could not search, except for key words.

You could not see a page, except for snippets.

They were trying to allow indexing and searching,

without allowing people to get copies.

And we will protect all copyrighted materials,

your work in that archive.

Let me repeat that.

I guarantee you we will protect all copyrighted materials.

I assure you we understand

that providing public access to materials and copyright,

particularly those still in print, would be unlawful.

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,

maybe the Google Street View Project...

Google launched Street View in 2007,

part of the search engine's long-term goal

to create a virtual 3D map of the whole planet,

right down to street level.

But investigations have revealed

that Google Street View cars

were collecting more than just photographs for their databanks.

Their antennas were also hoovering up personal information

from unencrypted Wi-Fi 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.

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 that 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 intellectual property rights to, to our site.

There isn't an area of human knowledge

that hasn't been filled out and made more rich and wondrous

by the fact of the Internet.

I am often sort of shocked by people who see it

as the beginnings of this dystopian future.

I embrace it unequivocally.

The Fundamental Knowledge System

which accumulates, sorts, keeps in order

and renders available everything that is known

centres on Barcelona.

With its 17 million active workers,

it is the Memory Of Mankind.

You can look at the Internet as something divine.

We eventually will come, I think,

to revere some of our technological creations,

like the Internet,

to be almost like cathedrals of redwoods,

to be as complicated and as beautiful

as natural creations.

And that, in a real sense,

that there is more of God in a cellphone

than there is in a tree frog,

because a cellphone is an additional layer of evolution

over the natural frog.

It's a new form of medieval church or something like that.

Everybody is to give their data

in service of worship of this digital god.

And I think it's really, really dumb.

It's not unique to this era,

you can look at previous technologies, whether it was radio,

whether it was television,

whether it was the telegraph, it was electricity,

you do have many similar hopes -

that those technologies will bring universal communication,

people will talk to one another, there will be peace everywhere,

education will spread globally...

A lot of similar hopes have been expressed

in connection with earlier technologies.

So this is nothing new, but I think there is something about the scale

at which projects and groups and various companies and organisations

now are putting those cyber-utopian beliefs to work

that is different now than from what it was before.

Science fiction never imagined Google.

Google is a game-changing tool

on the order of the equally handy flint hand axe.

But Google is not ours.

We are its unpaid content providers, in one way or another.

We generate product for Google,

our every search a miniscule contribution.

Google is made of us,

a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.

We have yet to take Google's measure.

I do think that Google genuinely

wants to make all of the world's information organised and available

to people throughout the globe.

I do think that they genuinely believe in that mission.

Um... But they also happen to believe that nothing will get lost

and no-one will get harmed

if it's Google who will implement that mission.

And I think it's normal.

If they didn't trust themselves to do it, then they would be...

you know, they would have some weird schizophrenic problem,

you know, if they don't trust themselves

to implement their own project.

One of the concerns which came out, as you would expect from France,

was that this was really part of a plot

in the United States to make English the universal language

and, as we know, the most important thing about France,

aside from its wine, is its language.

And there was a real sense

that who are we to be digitising all those books in English?

And I remember some correspondence about the fact

that we, at Harvard, were not just digitising English books,

but were digitising a very large number of books in French.

To which, if I remember correctly, the response came back,

"Who are you to digitise books in French?"

First, we learned that Google was scanning books.

And I remember loving that 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 copyrights

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 into Google

and saw that it came up with snippets of my books.

So what I did was I 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 about your searches,

you could see quite a bit of the text, if not all of it.

The problem that most authors have is obscurity.

That's the issue. There are a gazillion books.

How do you get people to pay attention to yours?

Google claimed that its use of these millions of copyrighted books

that it had digitised was an example of fair use.

Why? I'm not sure.

I still don't understand how that can be justified.

The 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 the million books?

So The Authors Guild organised a class action suit,

asking them to stop doing that.

The Authors Guild on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against search engine Google

alleging that scanning and digitising library books

constitutes a massive copyright infringement.

The Authors Guild represents more than 8,000 authors

and it's the largest society of published writers

in the United States.

When Google made its decision to scan these millions of books,

it certainly realised 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.

The Association of American Publishers

has filed a lawsuit against Google

alleging the Internet company's plan to scan

and digitally distribute the text of major library collections

would violate copyright protections.

I think the issue of copyright is an archaic, 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.

The Internet is the world's largest copy machine,

anything that touches it, it's been copied.

And, just to transmit something along the way,

um...people are making copies of things.

Copies are valueless, they have no worth at all

until there was a focus on copies

because that's an industrial-age artefact.

A book is really a plateau that a person reaches to say,

"This is my testament, this is what I can offer."

A book is not just an extra long tweet,

a book is something that's hard to do.

It's hard to finish. It's hard to publish.

It's a certain achievement of scale,

it's a declaration of this is what my life has learned,

this is what I can offer.

And that is not something that can be dissected

and the little minced pieces simply can't mean the same thing.

The lawsuits were commenced in the fall of 2005

and, within six months,

The Authors Guild and the publishers came to Google

with a proposal about settling the lawsuit.

I was sitting innocently in my office

and a lawyer for the university appeared and he said,

"You are about to take a non-disclosure oath."

Well, I'd never had anything to do with lawyers,

except once in my life when I made a will and I thought,

"Um, I'm in deep water now. What is this all about?"

Well, it turned out that there were secret negotiations

between Google, on the one hand,

and The Authors Guild and The Association of American Publishers on the other.

They were suing Google for infringement of copyright

and, as happens frequently with suits,

they began to negotiate a settlement.

Well, we were not part of that at Harvard.

However, we had to be informed about it because we had the books.

It took three years to work it out,

because there were a lot of issues to be discussed.

There were publishers at the table as well as authors.

And publishers and authors did not have identical interests.

There were libraries, not at the table, but very much in the picture.

They were talking to Google away from the room.

And I'm not sure how much I can say.

I definitely cannot talk specifically about the negotiations

because I signed a non-disclosure agreement,

which I'm told is still in force,

and I don't want to go to jail.

Google's long-running legal battle with the US publishing industry

came to an unexpected halt this morning

as the parties announced a settlement

that would see both sides cooperate

on online access to copyrighted books.

Google have agreed to pay £125 million in the settlement.

£35.5 million of that sum will go towards the establishment

of a rights collecting body for digital books.

45 millions has been set aside to compensate writers

whose copyrighted books Google has already scanned.

They will get around 60 per book.

The largest portion of the settlement, 45.5 million,

will go just on the legal fees.

But the most striking aspect of the agreement

is that it turns Google into a book seller, selling online access

to out-of-print but still-in-copyright works.

For those of you who don't know the details of the settlement agreement,

it's 385 pages,

it has 46 sections of definitions,

it's got 15 sections on Google's obligations,

it's got nine sections on the economic terms,

it's got six sections on libraries' obligations.

So this is not a little three-or-four page memorandum of understanding

that we are talking about here.

This is a very heavily-negotiated agreement.

So how many people have not read the 334 pages?

CHUCKLING

OK.

We proposed something that was a little bit outside the box

and that was - if money is being made,

share the money with the rights holders.

It couldn't be simpler.

So I thought it would be pretty non-controversial.

That apparently was naive of me.

I personally became increasingly disenchanted

with what originally looked like a great idea.

They basically transformed the search service

into a gigantic commercial enterprise.

They really thought they would digitise every book in existence

and make it available, for a price, everywhere.

The settlement would allow Google to have essentially a licence

to commercialize all books that are out of print.

There were certainly hundreds of thousands

and probably millions of books,

for whom, even if they were in copyright,

no author, no publisher, no rights holder would come forward.

And those books are orphans

and Google would be able to commercialize those

and nobody else would.

A monopoly was being created, a monopoly of access to knowledge.

Did we want the greatest library that would ever exist

to be in the hands of one giant corporation,

which could really charge almost anything it wanted for access to it?

It's not a library, it's a bookstore

and, you know, sell it as a bookstore, if you want,

but don't pretend that it's a library.

When I talk to people in the publishing industry,

they find it humorous cos it's like, "Well, they're orphan for a reason..."

CHUCKLING

And that in fact if we suddenly found this goldmine

-where the future of the book are the orphan books...

-Yeah.

..OK, then, boy, those publishers sure aren't very smart.

Our principal concern here today in this discussion

is that, under the proposed settlement,

Google would be the only entity that could treat copyright

as an opt-out mechanism.

Everyone else would have to treat it as opt-in.

There are other problems with this proposed settlement.

Listed below are various potential revenue streams for Google

as identified within the settlement -

institutional subscriptions,

consumer purchases, advertising uses, public access service,

print-on-demand, custom publishing,

PDF downloads, consumer subscription model,

summaries, abstracts, compilations of books.

That's what you are going to end up with at a minimum.

What I'm saying to you, Mr Drummond,

does this, in fact, place Google at such a tremendous advantage

in disregard of what has been historically copyright law?

How do you respond to those concerns?

As of today, we have zero market share in any sort of books,

so we're a new entrant to the market.

So far from being someone who's controlling the market,

we're not even in it yet and we're trying to get in there.

They thought, "All we have to do is kind of announce this to the world

"and the world will go, 'God, what a great agreement!'"

And, for a while, some people did.

But then, you started reading the agreement really carefully

and there were lots of questions.

The problem was there was nothing in the agreement

that respected the privacy of the people

who were looking at the books.

Google was going to be keeping track

of who exactly was reading that book,

how long they were reading it and what they read next.

That information could get back to the government,

could get back to the FBI, could get back to the police,

could get back to their employer.

Because Google wasn't making any kind of guarantees

about what they were going to do in respect of this privacy.

If people find that the privacy policies of a particular technology

are not to their liking, they should unplug it.

They should retreat from the Internet.

They should cut off their phone lines

and they should go up and hide in a mountain.

They have that choice.

Well's conception of the World Brain was that

it was intended to have a power of surveillance over mankind -

information gathered and organised in such a way

that we had an eye that could actually survey

everything that was going on.

It would be able to register where everybody was,

everywhere they went,

potentially, all the transactions that they were engaged in.

And he seemed to think this is likely to be a good thing.

It was a gradual process

of getting to know the details of Google Book Search

and it was the cumulative effect of these details

that made me feel this project was, actually,

something that I myself could not recommend

to the president and fellows of Harvard

as something that we should enthusiastically support.

HG Wells' idea of the World Brain

was a dictatorship of technologists and intellectuals.

These are the geeks of their day

and, gradually, he saw their power would spread

from laboratory to laboratory, from university to university,

as these people with the expertise began to coalesce

into sort of almost like managerial groups

that would mean that we don't need the politicians

and the conflicts and the noise,

the confusion, the babble.

But for the World Brain there was to be a further component

and this is the component that is what disturbs me.

It's how that would be used

to achieve the ultimate goals of civilisation,

as it appears to have been evolving towards.

It's going to change how we interface with information.

People are going to ask, "How did it do that?

"How did it accomplish this task

"which before we thought only humans could ever hope to do?"

David Hume held this view

that sense and experience are the sole foundation of knowledge.

Watson?

What is empiricism?

After IBM's success with Deep Blue,

they looked around for other kinds of games that they could take on.

And they wanted something

that was a very different kind of game than chess.

And so, they picked Jeopardy!,

which is basically a fancy trivia game,

it's one of those games that you or I could play.

It's a human standing there with their carbon and water

versus the computer with all of its silicon

and its main memory and its disk.

After Germany invaded the Netherlands,

this Queen, her family and cabinet fled to London. Maria?

Who is Beatrice?

No, Watson?

Who is Wilhelmina?

That is correct.

This US President negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth

ending the Russo-Japanese War.

Watson?

Who is Theodore Roosevelt?

Good for 800...

I did talk to Larry Page when Google first started

because I was really perplexed

about why would anybody make a new search engine

when we had AltaVista,

which was the current search engine.

It seemed good enough.

And he said, "Oh, it's not to make a search engine, it's to make an AI."

Most of my discussions have been with Larry Page.

We've talked in general about their quest

to digitise all knowledge

and then develop true AI.

You can create intelligent systems if you have very large databases.

And books are actually probably more valuable

than all the other stuff on the Internet,

cos we have a high standard for what we put in books.

The computer industry and its implications

in terms of information technology

is a multi-trillion-dollar part of the economy.

It will be, you know, the basis of everything we do in the future.

What Watson showed was you can take a very large, very messy set of data

and if you can use those inputs correctly,

you can actually answer really sophisticated questions.

And, certainly, the presence of large amounts of data on the Internet

is going to be as much an input for machines as it is for people.

What we really will need to top that

is computer systems that can understand natural language.

And natural language understanding is actually coming along very well.

IBM's Watson is a very good example of the current state of the art

in computers understanding natural language,

cos not only did Watson have to understand

the convoluted language in the Jeopardy! query,

which includes metaphors and similes and puns, and riddles and jokes,

but it got its knowledge to respond to the query

from actually reading 200 million pages of natural-language documents,

including all of Wikipedia, and several other encyclopaedias.

And when you see a computer play it better than we ever could,

it's one of those moments where you realise,

"Oh, yes, the world really IS different."

An IBM supercomputer named Watson

has won the first ever Jeopardy! quiz show competition

starring a computer as a player.

Google Book Project is, in a sense, trying to make that universal library

which could then be read by an AI or a Watson-like supercomputer.

By 2045, we'll have expanded, according to my calculations,

the intelligence and capability of the human machine civilisation

a billion fold.

So that's such a profound transformation,

such a singular transformation, that we call it the singularity.

Now, this is not yet inside my body or brain.

It may as well be. I'm very dependent on it.

I think this is part of who I am.

Ultimately, this kind of device will be the size of blood cells

and will go inside our body to keep us healthy,

go inside our brains, put our brains directly on the Internet,

give us direct access to the entire library of all books.

AI is just a religion. It doesn't matter.

What's really happening is real world examples from real people

who entered their answers, their trivia,

their experiences into some online database.

It's actually just a giant puppet theatre repackaging

inputs from real people who are forgotten.

We are pretending they aren't there.

This is something I really want people to see.

The insane structure of modern finance is exactly

the same as the insane structure of modern culture on the Internet.

They're precisely the same.

It's an attempt to gather all the information into a high castle,

optimise the world and pretend that all the people the information came

from don't deserve anything. It's all the same mistake.

Google Search is going to be assisted intelligence

and not artificial intelligence.

In my mind I think of Search as this beautiful symphony

between the user and the search engine and we make music together.

Before the law, there stands a guard.

A man comes from the country begging admittance to the law.

The man tries to peer through the entrance.

He had been taught that the law should be accessible to every man.

"Do not attempt to enter without my permission," says the guard.

This tale is told during the story called The Trial.

I've been surprised at the level of controversy there

because digitising the world's books and making them available,

there's really... there's nobody else who's attempted it at our scale

or who is really working on it.

And I feel like we had a number of technical challenges

which we've overcome.

There was this legal dispute which we have a settlement,

settlements proposed, that we at least jointly agree to with

the authors and publishers and so forth but it remains somewhat

controversial, so I'm surprised at the amount of resistance that's had

but, ultimately, I'm optimistic that we're going to be successful.

It's important to understand that the Google Books element was

negotiated by a small number of people claiming to represent

authors and claiming to represent publishers,

but not every author and not every publisher was in the room

so once the settlement's announced, there's a six-month period

in which it's required to notify them about the terms of the settlement

and give them a chance to opt out if they don't like the settlement

or to give them a chance to object to the terms of the settlement.

The first time I realised Google scanned my book was 2009, November.

Actually my lawyer called me

and he said, "Do you know your book be scanned by Google Book?"

The search engine Google came under intense fire from Chinese authors

as the digital library used books written by Chinese authors

without permission.

The reader, they can search my book by the keyword and maybe around

100 keyword, but I remember the most ridiculous keyword of my book

is 'bed', B-E-D, and 'telephone'.

That's two words I remember and that made me laugh.

This is not intellectual at all.

Me and my lawyer decide to sue Google.

My lawyer asked 60,000, something like that.

My journalist friends said, "I don't want to help you but I know you.

"Why you ask such low money?" so I wrote this blog that night.

When I wake up, it's, like, 400 messages at my blog saying,

"Damage this girl," and, "This girl's a bitch."

Blah blah blah. Really disgusting, horrible messages.

I become a public enemy after Google say they will leave China.

Also, Chinese young people started sending flowers to the Google office

which has made even my best friend be confused.

She say, "Is the government sending you to sue Google?"

Before the court is the plaintiff's motion to approve

the settlement as fair and reasonable.

Numerous materials have been submitted.

Did anyone count up the number of objections?

-We have in the range of 500.

-Thank you.

I flew to New York and it was very exciting.

There were 25 outside parties that

made presentations to Judge Chin.

There were 500 objections for him to read.

The judge basically said, "I'm not going to rule from the bench,"

but people were hanging on every word.

This is a fascinating turning point actually in the whole history of

knowledge and of access to knowledge

and it was being played out in a New York courtroom

before Judge Denny Chin

in the Southern Federal District Court of New York.

I confirm that one of my books has been digitally scanned by Google

without my permission.

Because this act is a clear violation of the copyright

law of Japan, I have asked the Metropolitan Police Department

of Japan to criminally charge Google and its CEO for this violation.

The court's decision was to a considerable extent going to

determine the future of books, of digital books.

The proposed settlement results in a de facto monopoly on information

and an intensification of media concentration on Google.

As a result, the right of free access to information,

as well as the existing cultural diversity in both Germany and Europe

will be usurped.

Would it be basically in the hands of commercial speculators,

whose responsibility was to their shareholders

or would it be organised for the public good?

There was a risk of monopolisation there,

that the Department of Justice saw.

The proposed settlement would establish a marketplace

in which only one competitor

would have authority to use a vast array of works.

The risk was that Google could basically hold the whole

world hostage to the price of access to these books

and, because no-one else would have a licence,

no-one else would have a corpus like the corpus they had,

we'd have to pay whatever they wanted to charge.

The core concerns seem to be that this would diminish

the availability to read books in private.

That is not true. This service would be available at public libraries.

You can walk into your neighbourhood library, you can sit down at

a free access terminal, anonymously.

You can search for and read a book.

And if you want to look at it at home, then what?

Well, if you want to look at it at home, that may present an issue.

Here's the rub.

This is a tension between requirements for security

that are insisted on in order not to have these works be

sort of freely disseminated.

In my view, the Google Book Search settlement is no different from the

piracy cases in which the Internet and digital technology are abused.

I strongly urge the court to reject the proposed settlement.

I remember there being a Japanese writer there

and the language was very vivid.

It was as though, you know,

copyright was going to be swept away,

and that copyright was going to be destroyed and the approval of this

settlement was going to, you know,

make the United States out of compliance with treaty obligations.

There's a real risk that, should the court approve the settlement,

members of the World Trade Organisation will initiate

settlement proceedings against the US government.

And if the US government were to lose such proceedings,

which is a very real possibility, our partners would be

entitled to impose trade sanctions against the United States.

You don't use words like that very often.

It wasn't kind of like, "Oh, gee, there are these issues

"and we're concerned about something."

It was like, "THIS VIOLATES A TREATY!

"HOW CAN THE JUDGE DO SOMETHING THAT'S GOING TO VIOLATE A TREATY?

"THIS IS CRAZY!"

I am not going to rule today.

There is just too much to digest. I will reserve decision.

-There's much to think about.

-All rise.

And then Judge Chin thought about it.

He thought about it and he thought about it.

He took a very long time and every morning I got up and I thought,

"Is Judge Chin going to announce his decision today?"

And when he finally did, I myself felt thrilled

because the court actually refused to sanction the settlement.

Then Google Book Search could not take place, at least according

to Google's original business plan.

US circuit judge Denny Chin said the creation of a universal library

would benefit many but would simply go too far.

Chin said the settlement of a class action law suit that the

company reached with US authors and publishers would grant Google

significant rights to exploit entire books

without permission of copyright owners.

Chin also said the deal gives Google a significant advantage over

competitors and it would be rewarding it for engaging in

wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission.

I think you could read the decision by Judge Chin as a defeat

of the screen by the book.

But this is a long war.

This is one battle and,

whatever triumph there might have been for books,

it's going to be short-lived,

because the screen will ultimately triumph.

They spent several months trying to negotiate a new settlement,

couldn't reach a new settlement that was mutually acceptable,

so they're going to have to go to trial.

'Baidu, China's search engine giant, has been blamed by Chinese

'writers for participating in copyright violation.

'This is because the website offers free online excerpts of stories

'and books without the authors' prior approval.'

I think very late March or early April of 2011,

we purged the site of about 2.8 million files that we believed

might be copyright infringing within a period of 72 hours.

I think a good number of them were books or chapters of books.

We implemented a rule where no-one could upload anything of more

than 1,000 Chinese characters without it being manually inspected

for copyright infringement

or automatically inspected for copyright infringement.

The problem is then people started uploading parts of books

in 1,000-character increments so they would avoid detection.

So there's always people who want to abuse the system.

The question is,

has Google already been able to make its search engine better because

of the Google Books corpus and the scanning of 20 million books?

I think the answer to that is yes.

The question of whether large Internet

companies are making our lives easier or gaining power over us,

I think it presents a kind of false binary because they're doing both.

If they were not making our lives easier,

no-one would be using their services.

This is the tricky, complicated question

that we'll have to face down the road.

All of them are making our lives easier.

They're making products cheaper.

They're making our commute less bothersome and more exciting.

Google will be supplying us with glasses that will augment reality

and tell us about where our friends are in the city.

They'll tell us the weather. They'll tell us everything.

The question is what would the trade-offs be?

What happens with all of the information that would pass

through Google Glasses? Surely it will be stored somewhere.

I'm sure Google will not be discarding it because they will

need to know what it is that I've seen yesterday

so that they can customise what I see today even better.

But then the question is, would the National Security Agency be able to

go to Google and ask for that data?

Ask for everything I've seen through my Google Glasses?

And if that would be the case then the question should be

do we actually want to have a society where citizens are wearing

CCTV cameras on their heads?

Getting to a better system where people are rewarded

for their information contribution to the world, getting to that system

from where we are, where people are expected to get by with less,

that's going to be a hard transition.

They might involve government but they might involve the big companies

and the reason why is the big companies like Google and Amazon

are shooting themselves in the foot with what we're doing

because what we're doing is shrinking the economy. I mean...

My concern is not so much the direction in which Google,

Facebook for that matter, want to take the world.

My concern is the fact

that it's Google and Facebook taking us in that direction.

Our current policy to open up the library and make it part of this

really very ambitious project, more ambitious I think than Google's,

which we call the Digital Public Library of America.

You know, I think that we owe a great deal to Google.

I can't imagine that this Digital Public Library of America

would ever have gotten off the ground had Google not started to

race ahead with its own version of digitization on this massive scale.

However, you know, Google, wonderful as it is,

is not familiar with books.

For example, Walt Whitman's famous book of poems, Leaves Of Grass,

was catalogued under gardening.

We are designing the Digital Public Library of America

so that it will be perfectly compatible with Europeana

and that means soon we will have a worldwide network.

A gigantic world library.

HG Wells' view of science and technology was what sustained him

and sustained his ideas throughout his whole life.

He had this sense that, if only we could get the scientists and the

technologists working in the right way,

we could transform the world

and he continued with that belief up until

the absolute final disillusionment with the entire human world.

It was a book which he called, so fittingly,

Mind At The End Of Its Tether.

He felt that the whole evolutionary process that he had been studying

and he felt was leading us to something new and wonderful,

had failed.

And his last words were that there was no way out or round or through.

HG WELLS: Our world of self-delusion will perish amidst its evasions

and fortuities.

It is like a convoy lost in darkness along an unknown rocky coast

with quarrelling pirates in the chart room and savages clambering up

the sides of the ship to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them.

That is the rough outline of the more

and more jumbled movie on the screen before us.

There is no way out.

Or round.

Or through.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd