A little Google history lesson 🍵
It's 2004. Google has just announced an exciting new venture: Google Print. With the blessing of five major libraries, Google sets out to digitalize the world's print material. Its search function, which will allow people to read and review print books digitally, is set to revolutionize information forever.
There was only one, teeny tiny problem... they didn't ask permission.
None.
At all.
Authors were gobsmacked. Nothing like this had ever happened before. What right had Google to scan, copy, and save copyrighted books to its databases... and at this scale? Lawsuits mounted. Google backpedaled, then talked of settling. Eventually, Ursula Le Guin spilled the tea. It was a whole thing.
Back then, the point many authors (including Le Guin) were making wasn't directed against the digitization of print books as such (widening access to the world's knowledge? Who doesn't want that?)...
No, authors were concerned with how Google went about it, and the threat it posed for intellectual property. Google's actions tossed aside the custom, long enshrined in law, that writers and publishers should have control over how their material is used and distributed—a tradition that many believe... exists for good reason.
(We'll get to it.)
What Le Guin and others realized is that Google's message of "democratizing the internet" (a platitude often used by techno-libertarians and broligarchs who, it turns out, aren't so keen on the whole "democracy" thing...) masked a sinister intention: to wrangle the world's commons under its own private control.
From where we're standing now (🥲), the scandal and ensuing lawsuit have a little too much familiarity: Google learned what they could get away with and how.
Then they kept doing that.
Move fast; break copyright; settle later (if ever).
The point is: the Print drama wasn't your average copyright scandal—it was the world's first ever mass data-harvesting event.
The training of Google Gemini began 22 years ago, on the day Google started claiming the world's knowledge for itself.
To understand our present predicaments, we have to know our history. Google Print was virgin soil. What followed—the scale of the data theft, the absolute skeeviness/grift of it all—felt unprecedented at the time.
But apparently, you had to be a writer to see it. 🤷♂️
