This documentary begins with a film clip of H.G. Wells from 1937 stating that the technology existed then to create a ‘world brain’, a repository of human knowledge for all to access. The filmmaker—who employed a female interviewer, even when in a Spanish monastery—then began tracking Google’s efforts to scan all the world’s books, by engaging in secret contracts with various major libraries [Harvard, the Monastery of Montserrat, etc.] during the course of which they scanned, without permission, six million copyrighted works. This project is in no way an open domain effort, and it is a commercial one.

Google authorities in the U.S. would not comment. There were plenty of ensuing interviews with heads of American and European libraries. The curators at Harvard and the Bibliotheque Nationale in France were candid and skeptical. The Frog in particular thought that the Google representatives were downright thuggish in a nerd way. The Spanish monk, when asked about his opinion where future Google commercial uses of his sacred texts were concerned, paused for perhaps thirty seconds, pain and confusion on his face, as if he was remembering the first time he was sodomized as an altar boy. He then recovered a little composure and said that he was not authorized to comment.

The most chilling example of a complete lack of respect for copyrights came from the female heads of American libraries, who seem to regard authors as their dutiful slaves. The filmmakers did bring in the Authors Guild people for their input. Really, aside from the Harvard man, all of the American and British commentators were hopelessly legalistic, representatives of a completely amoral society. The continental Europeans, though hopelessly degenerate in my eyes, at least seemed to harbor a notion of right and wrong, good and bad, instead of the Anglo-American ideal of what you can get away with and what you can’t. The brightest person to speak was thankfully Chinese. At least the world’s only growing major economy seems to have a mix of ability and morality among their information engineers.

There was also exposure of Google’s use of its street level mapping technology to collect IP codes from private wireless networks.

Fascinating