Tim Wu fragt sich im New Yorker «What Ever Happened to Google Books?».
30 Millionen Titel sind von Google bereits eingescannt, trotzdem beibt das meiste davon nur in kleinen Ausschnitten (Snippets) zugänglich wegen Copy-Right-Problemen. Eine mögliche Lösung dafür wäre (via ResearchBuzz: Firehose):
«(…) I have a simpler suggestion, nicknamed the Big Bang license. Congress should allow anyone with a scanned library to pay some price—say, a hundred and twenty-five million dollars—to gain a license, subject to any opt-outs, allowing them to make those scanned prints available to institutional or individual subscribers. That money would be divided equally among all the rights holders who came forward to claim the it in a three-year window—split fifty-fifty between authors an publishers. It is, admittedly, a crude, one-time solution to the problem, but it would do the job, and it might just mean that the world would gain access to the first real online library within this lifetime.»