GBS: Clive Thompson on the Brin Op-Ed


The title really says it all.

CliveChris Thompson, Sergey Brin Blows Smoke up Your Ass, Slate, Oct. 9, 2009:

But a Xerox machine could make the same boast; we don’t give it the right to exclusively negotiate royalties with authors who may not even know their works are being reproduced. Even though Google didn’t set out to hold a monopoly on millions of books, that’s what it ultimately tried to acquire. And Brin’s effort to minimize the barriers his rivals face to replicate Google’s archive is just insulting.


(Chris Thompson, not Clive Thompson)