Oleg Zabluda's blog
Monday, April 24, 2017
 
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When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an “international catastrophe.” When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who’d had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster. [OZ: idiots]
[...]
In August 2010, Google put out a blog post announcing that there were 129,864,880 books in the world. The company said they were going to scan them all. [...] This particular moonshot fell about a hundred-million books short of the moon.
[...]
After the settlement failed [...] at Google “there was just this air let out of the balloon.” Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google, and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning operation.
[...]
somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. [...] it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up. I asked someone who used to have that job, what would it take to make the books viewable in full to everybody? [...] You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

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