The last person you’d expect to speak out against the Google Book settlement with the Authors Guild which will make available the contents of millions of orphan books in digital form is Harvard law professor and free-culture advocate Lawrence Lessig. In a lengthy essay
in The New Republic he calls the settlement a “path to insanity” that will be “culturally asphyxiating,” but not for the reasons you might think.
Lessig believes the problem lies not so much with the settlement itself or Google, as it does with copyright law. But after pouring over the complex language of the 165-page settlement, he believes more than ever before in the need to overhaul copyright law for the Internet era (a theme he’s hit on before). Here is the gist of the problem as he explains it:
The deal constructs a world in which control can be exercised at the level of a page, and maybe even a quote. It is a world in which every bit, every published word, could be licensed. It is the opposite of the old slogan about nuclear power: every bit gets metered, because metering is so cheap. We begin to sell access to knowledge the way we sell access to a movie theater, or a candy store, or a baseball stadium. We create not digital libraries, but digital bookstores: a Barnes & Noble without the Starbucks.
via techcrunch.com