Let a Thousand Googles Bloom

"Copyright reform is vital to the spread of culture and information. By Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford and the founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. His latest book is "Free Culture" (Penguin, 2004).

Last month, Google announced a partnership with major research libraries to scan 20 million books for inclusion in Google's search database. For those works in the public domain, the full text will be available. For those works still possibly under copyright, only snippets will be seen. The potential of this project is only beginning to be understood  it is likely to bring about the most dramatic changes in the nature of research and the spread of culture since the birth of Google itself.

But the excitement around Google's extraordinary plan has obscured a dirty little secret: It is not at all clear that Google and these libraries have the legal right to do what is proposed." Let a Thousand Googles Bloom