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IT’S EASY TO WRITE off books as yesterday’s medium. They’re not searchable, they take up space, it’s ‘dead tree media’.
But books are such a boon to civilisation that Google kicked off “Project Ocean” in 2004. It came to be known as Google Books, an effort to digitalise and catalogue every book and make them freely available online.
It’s a polarising idea. Researchers and academics love the promise of instant access to any printed material they could ever want, but copyright holders and the Authors Guild were far from pleased. Not only were they not being compensated for their work, but Google launched the project without so much as seeking permission from them.
One of Google’s core missions is to organise the world’s information, and with books being the valuable storehouses of data that they have been for millennia, it is only obvious that the company would seek to establish a universal library of the world’s knowledge.
A documentary titled ‘Google and the World Brain‘ takes a detailed look at this ambitious undertaking, interviewing people who love and loathe it alike. For all the simplicity of ink and paper, the movie shows us that the complicated rabbit hole of intellectual property law runs far deeper than you’d think.
Here’s the story of Google Books…
Books have carried the world’s knowledge for millennia.
Famed sci-fi author HG Wells one hypothesized “a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent ‘World Encyclopedia’ that could help world citizens make the bes use of universal information.”
He wrote a book about the idea called ‘The World Brain’ in which he said something like this would, at least in part, require gethering as many “old fashioned” bookes as possible to squeeze out all the information contained in them.
But there are a lot of books out there and such an undertaking would require a lot of time and money.
Image: Google’s Sergey Brin.
Enter Google, a company with the resouces and commitment to information organisation to make such things come to light.
At a cost estimated between $30 and $100 per book, the company began digitising books by coordinating with libraries around the world to borrow as many books as possible, copyrighted and uncopyrighted alike.
Robert Darnton of the Harvard University Library was happy to let the company digitize the library’s public domain books. Other libraries offered up copyrighted books as well. Google even scanned old texts from a monastery in Spain.
Similar efforts have been made in the past. Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg is the world’s oldest digital library, archiving public domain writings since 1971.
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive not only aims to catalogue all books, but all web content as well.
IBM’s Watson supercomputer famously beat its human opponents in an exhibition match of Jeopardy due to its ability to process natural language and access huge stores of data taken from the Internet and libraries alike.
Above is a still frame from the only known video footage (six seconds long) of an actual Google book scanning setup. Famed futurist and current Google employee Ray Kurzweil is acknowledged as the inventor of OCR, or optical character recognition, which is the technology that enables a computer to convert a scanned document into digital text.
Advanced book scanning setups use professional cameras and lighting to capture incredibly high quality images before running them through OCR software and uploading them to the Internet.
Proponents of Google Books love it for many reasons, not only for the instant access to any book, but for the fact that books can essentially become immortal when scanned and stored digitally. No more lost books due to floods or fires.
But the opponents of the project want to be fairly compensated for their work. The Authors Guild sprang for legal action.
Kevin Kelly of Wired sees it as perfectly legal and useful. He said that all ideas are built on top of other ideas, so no one can “own” an idea.
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, former director of the National Library of France, found the idea appalling. He wants to protect culture and artists’ rights.
There was, of course, a court case to address the matter. It was resolved last month when Judge Denny Chin ruled that digitizing books was transformative enough that it was fair use.
We suspect paper books aren’t going anywhere anytime, and with Google’s book scanning operation moving forward with the law’s blessing, e-books are here to stay.
Watch the trailer for the movie:
(Video: polarstarfilms/YouTube)
- Declan Love, all images screenshots from Google and the World Brain.
I wonder how they will do the player stats? Will it be relative, or exactly the same scale as the men? A woman with the same physical stats as a man wouldn’t make much sense.
I think they’re making their own seperate scales for men and women. Unfortunately it won’t be possible to play female sides versus male sides.
Get your tlts out for the lads Andy gray be delighted
Will they bouncy bounce…..
intelligent input, cheers
Dave we wouldn’t expect you to understand.
Well after about 20 games or whatever they’re gonna have to come up with something new.
Women’s football is dire.
it raises the profile of the women’s game and the players on the teams probably get a fee for using their names and faces that’s the only reason i can see…
Or maybe it’s so women playing the game can play as women?
I’m more annoyed that fifa 16 is more the same as 15 and nothing has changed.
Like every other year?
your’re complaining about fifa not changing on an article about how fifa has changed to iclude women’s teams ???
Some people are never happy, huh!?
I was thinking more of adding new leagues like the Ukraine one, being able to change how much of a crowd there is, less bugs and crashes online and making it more real like handballs and such. I don’t mind women football in it but it will be forgotten about when the game comes out as it only really a few international teams and no club league team at all.
The inclusion of women teams will have no negative impact on other modes in the game so the indignation appearing on social media would appear to be attributable to misogyny. This isn’t being imposed on people, they can simply ignore the women teams and continue playing as they would any other year.
Gamer culture is rife with sexism, especially the Fifa, GTA and COD subcultures.
I agree a lot of gamers are sexist and to be a woman playing video games online must be infuriating.
But women like Anita Sarkeesian (I think that’s how you spell her name?) and her followers really don’t help that at all. She thinks up ways games are sexist from no where. Examples being in the game “Hitman Absolution” at one point of the game you walk through a strip club and are able to shoot the people in the strip club and even though you are penalised for doing it she said its sexist because its advocating violence against women. She’s done the same with the GTA game series too.
She makes up shite about games and is lauded on this site for it. That lad last week made up shite about mad max and was slammed by the same writers. The pair of then are more alike than different.
You should watch “reviewtechusa” on YouTube and his most recent video about her inclusion in times most influential people and how she got there.Very interesting stuff.
I’ll have a look at that. I always have a bad feeling about people who are placed above criticism, especially when they are in the business of criticism themselves. Still, there’s a part of me that can’t help admire how she can rake in the cash while having the tumblratchikks do all of the donkey work. Not admire in an approving way, it’s more like the admiration I feel watching Wolf of Wall Street.
The thing I can’t understand is how people can actually agree with what she is saying. It literally makes no sense what so ever and people still listen to her.
It’s bit about right and wrong, it’s about confirmation bias and agendas . Victim status has its own advantages so they just lap up whatever suits their current view.
So many sexist comments there…
Did you expect anything less?
What are you on about? There’s no such thing as sexism, *especially* among journal commenters
I meant the tweets.
My wife’s a girl and she thinks it’s a step back, she says them girls should be at home making the dinners not playing keepy upies
Your wife is a girl? Well thank heavens for that
Will be interesting to see the women player’s stats compared to the mens. And how accurate the models are. Feels like a pointless nod to progressives at the moment.
Firstly, IT’S A GAME!! Stats are fictional. They’re abitrary numbers.
Secondly, for someone who thinks it is some weird progressive nod, you seem to hold the character Magneto in high esteem using him as your avatar & name where the entire basis of his character was an analogy (Malcolm X) for the struggle of LGBTQ & African American people…. unless you were doing it as some pointless nod to progressives…
Malcolm X did not care for LGBTQ people that’s incredibly inaccurate.
Sorry google suggests Malcolm X was actually a rent boy while it was Martin Luther King that was no fan of the LBGT’s.
“Incredibly inaccurate”. That is perfect. You made my day Joe :)
In fairness Ciaran I’ve corrected the record, I mixed my black revolutionaries up and had never realised Malcolm X was in to blokes.
I never said he was first of all. Secondly if you read the original comment I was saying how the character was an analogy for both of these issues. You were the one who was calling him a “rent boy”. You’re a terrible homophobe & sexist! The entire thread of comments here has been a pure torrent of sexism & misogyny. What is wrong with you people?!
Why are you talking about lgbt and race issues Ciaran? Neither have anything to do with what I posted.
Are you denying Ciaran a safe space? Bigot!
I think it’s a cool feature to add but for this instalment it will get boring for people quickly since there are no women’s leagues going to be in the game. Maybe in a few years time we will be seeing a women’s football FIFA game on the shelves in GameStop since its quickly rising in popularity.
To all the people enraged and upset by this allow me to add a bit of perspective-
IT’S A F*”KING COMPUTER GAME!!! GET OVER IT!
FIFA and a fap. Great news!
Wonder will they be wearing extra tight shorts just like Sepp advises.
It would be interesting to see how many people would like to play as female football players. As mentioned in one of those tweets, one would imagine there are other features the community want more.
Seems they are just looking for easy press for a stale old franchise and usual rags have obliged. In years to come I’ll laugh when people look back and remember the years of ‘femsploitation’ and the idiots who fell for it.
So u mean that it’s a woman in the picture??? !!
Adds women… Doesn’t add Stephanie Roche!… EA for you folks!
Shocking that EA isn’t making it a paid DLC.
Shocking EA isn’t releasing it as a paid DLC.
have your say