Right around the time when eCommerce became the buzz word of the day, I worked with a girl named Angela at a software firm who contracted out full project teams to companies who had not yet trained their workforce to use web based technology. Angela and I considered ourselves artist, but avoided being the suffering kind by working as technical writers and HTML coders. Our personal usage of the internet was all about access to free information and cool stuff. The projects we worked on were all about how to make money on the web, which caused us to view all profit-interested companies as greedy and abusers of this new wonderful technology. We had a secret catch phrase that we emailed to back and forth and sometimes scribbled on each other’s note pads in meetings: “Use the internet for good, not for evil.”  Our heroes in this emerging technology field were the founders of Google. Their philosophy seemed to be all about using the internet for good. Their mega search engine was free to use and originally had no favorite links in the search results.

Fast forward to 2004. Google is now a huge company making loads of money, a lot of it through their online advertising. They announced that they are going to start a “library project” which involves scanning books from the public domain, creating a huge digital library that can be shared by the masses. By December that year, they started scanning books that were still copyrighted but defended the action by explaining that only snippets are going to be shown online (even though they scan the all pages of every book). Authors started to rumble and a law suit was filed in 2005. Read more »