Patrick McDon­ald let me know he has started a new blog, PHM3. The sub­ti­tle is “Infor­ma­tion, Libraries, and Provoca­tive Ideas,” and the first one is a doozy: The Google Propo­si­tion — Chal­leng­ing our Iden­tity, Fur­ther­ing Our Mission?

“Imag­ine this: Google, whose mis­sion is ‘to orga­nize the world’s infor­ma­tion and make it uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble and use­ful’, real­izes it’s too expen­sive or just not worth it to fight the fight to scan and make copy­righted books avail­able online. Instead they acquire one or more pub­lish­ing houses (who per­haps can be had for a rea­son­able price because their major media par­ents are dis­ap­pointed with their con­tri­bu­tions to the cor­po­rate bot­tom line) with the inten­tion of pro­vid­ing unlim­ited simul­ta­ne­ous, free access to texts online while ‘mon­e­tiz­ing’ that access via adver­tis­ing in the same way they have very suc­cess­fully mon­e­tized search results. Then being as resource rich as they are, Google attracts writ­ers and book pro­duc­ers by offer­ing bet­ter com­pen­sa­tion in exchange for the right make their to-be-published works imme­di­ately and ‘uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble’ online. In addi­tion to mon­e­tiz­ing book access, Google claims it is doing ‘good’ by mak­ing this infor­ma­tion ‘uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble and use­ful’ free of charge to readers.…

Would we protest, per­haps out of a short-sighted desire to pre­serve our­selves as an insti­tu­tion as we have tra­di­tion­ally existed?

OR

Would we embark on some kind of ‘trans­for­ma­tional change’ (as many before me have called it), sat­is­fied our mis­sion of pro­vid­ing freely avail­able infor­ma­tion is sub­stan­tially (if not per­fectly acheived — per­haps nego­ti­at­ing elec­tronic and hard copy fail safes to main­tain access in case Google and oth­ers become ‘evil’) and reori­ent and rede­vote our­selves using freed up resources to address other com­mu­nity needs — host­ing cul­tural and/or social cen­ters, focus­ing on instruct­ing and becom­ing ‘People’s Uni­ver­si­ties’, nav­i­gat­ing the avail­able infor­ma­tion etc.…”

Could Google rede­fine copy­right (dig­i­tal fair use rights really) through behav­ior rather than law? As Anil Dash notes, “If YouTube has cre­ated some­thing fan­tas­tic, and it required copy­right vio­la­tion to do so, then copy­right law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, peo­ple — they’re not carved on stone tablets.” What would dig­i­tal fair use rights look like in this model? You can remix and re-use con­tent, as long as you keep the ads? Do the ads become part of the copy­righted work?

Provoca­tive indeed — leave your thoughts over on Paul’s blog, and then sub­scribe to his feed to find out how he tops this post.