Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

orestian:

transgirlkyloren:

somervta:

Reading this made me cry.

I’ll repeat the central takeaway; “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”
Beat up on Google all you want, but this is not on them. They poured an outstandingly unexpected amount of money and effort into doing this – something no one else has done mostly because it doesn’t make economical sense – managed to find a delightful way to do it legally, to books in copyright with no one to gain from that copyright, and they got shut down by a) the DOJ and b) a relative handful of authors that, in large part, were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good – who wanted it done, but not by Google.

We were this close.

hey google employees

libgen

hey google employees…. torrents

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria