iMDB Rating: 6.9
Date Released : Date: 18 Jan 2013 (USA)
Genre : Documentary | Drama
Starring :Brendan Price, Nicolas Chapman, Molly Malcolm
Movie Quality : BRrip
Format : MKV
Size : 970MB
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Review :
The story of the most ambitious project ever conceived on the Internet, and the people who tried to stop it. In 1937 HG Wells predicted the creation of the "World Brain", a giant global library that contained all human knowledge which would lead to a new form of higher intelligence. Seventy year later the realization of that dream was underway, as Google scanned millions and millions of books for its Google Books website. But over half those books were still in copyright, and authors across the world launched a campaign to stop them, climaxing in a New York courtroom in 2011. A film about the dreams, dilemmas and dangers of the Internet, set in spectacular locations in China, USA, Europe and Latin America.
Total movie: 90/100 Acting: 80/100 Effects: 80/100 Book Changes: 80/100 Awesome Level: 100/100
Scanning the world's books is just the tip of a double-edged sword representing the increasing domination power of Google and other Silicon Valley players. Copyright is copyright ... it takes precious time for an author or any creative artist to imagine a work, create it, edit it and copyright it. Why should Google hoover up these books, not ask proper copyright permission (according to the writers' reps/library spokespersons featured in the movie), avoid due compensation, and pimp out the books for Google's own commercial purposes at some later future time. Once you give up a data scan to another, you cannot put that digital genie back in the bottle. One could see how smaller, niche collections might swallow the pitch on how Google's mother-of-all-xerox can enable whole world access to their tomes (access good, stiffing the copyright owner(s) bad). So the European response in the movie (which was for the writers and copyright owners but ultimately against Google's copyright-trodding actions) seems to be the thoughtful and correct one; the Google opponents reacted to all the right issues -- compensation, copyright permission, what is fair use, and the blanket giving of power to one organization. Libraries can digitize their own collections and index/promote their abstracts to the internet; in the end each library can control its material, and writers and have the right to get paid for use of their material. This review is regarding this book-scanning project only, it is understood that many benefit from Google's other services. But we must pick a battle once in awhile. So much power cannot be given to one organization, especially now that we have seen it spread its tentacles outside of its core business model, including building robot armies.
