Harry Potter and the great Google onslaught

The bunfight over Google's library project only serves to remind us that intellectual property battles are nothing new

Robert McCrum writing in The Observer, Sunday 14 February 2010

The message of Google's logo, multicoloured playschool letters in a goofy font, is a masterpiece of corporate misdirection. Hey!, it says, we're just a bunch of kids having fun with some cool new stuff. The reality is not goofy at all. As the Google Library Project – the mass digitisation of more than 10 million library books, several million of which are still in copyright – emerges from a protracted courtroom battle in the US, some people would argue that a more appropriate logo might be that other kids' book icon: the skull and crossbones.

It's tempting – Google certainly encourages this – to see the age of MicrAmazoogle as revolutionary, a thrilling new era in which the civilised world can airbrush the imperfections of the past and march into a new dawn. Thus Google recapitulates the American dream, and that was the tone of a Google vice-president writing last week in the Guardian. "If you love books and care about the knowledge they contain," trumpeted David Drummond, "there is a problem that needs to be solved... Imagine if it were possible to bring these [out of print, copyright] books back to life… Imagine if that information could be made available to everyone, everywhere, at the click of a mouse."

Leaving aside the inconvenient facts ignored by this argument, the big picture is sorrier, murkier and more time-hallowed than you might imagine. From print culture's beginnings to the rise of the internet, there has been a succession of intellectual property wars for which the English language has just one word: piracy.

This is the title of a fascinating new American study, Piracy, by Adrian Johns (Chicago, £24), which places Google's activities in a larger landscape of copyright infringement. If you thought that knocking off a fake Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire" in Beijing – a scam that cost author and publisher millions of pounds – was a 21st-century problem, consider the case of Cervantes, bestselling author of Don Quixote. The first volume of Cervantes's masterpiece was such a runaway success that it inspired a mini-genre of spurious sequels, rip-offs and (in England) corrupt translations. Like any author, Cervantes was alert to his creative rights and the problem of piracy. The second volume of Don Quixote finds the questing knight encountering spurious characters from unauthorised sequels, while the plot itself unfolds to outwit the menace of pirated alternative narratives. In the end, Don Quixote dies, says Cervantes, to make sure that no more bogus sequels can be foisted on the unsuspecting public.
Read the rest of McCrum's piece online.