From Forbes
How Google Is Leveraging Our Culture
By Quentin Hardy
BERKELEY, Calif. -- With about six weeks to go before the crucial stage of the largest copyright settlement ever, we may be ignoring its most important dimension.
For the most part, the fighting over the $125 million settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over Google's initiative to digitize some 10 million books is about author, publisher and privacy rights for volumes under copyright. It is, in effect, a dispute over how we treat a digitized text, 10 million times over....
Legal scholars attending an all-day seminar on the settlement, held by the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley on Friday, held out the prospect that Google's corpus might be viewed as private land that is purchased to become a national park. In those places, something is declared a national treasure and set aside, if necessary under the duress of eminent domain. That might ease some of the ramification concerns. With a decision so close, however, and Google able to gain so much, that is not likely.
This story also appeared in MSNBC News