The principal American contributions are barely disguised expressions of diverse economic interests. Competing software businesses are afraid of Google’s dominance. Publishers fear any departure from their existing business model and so, with less cause, do authors. Established vested interests will win the short-term political battle. But the market will destroy these vested interests in the end, as has happened in music. .....
What is needed is a public option. The great libraries of the past – from Oxford’s Bodleian Library to Andrew Carnegie’s small town facilities – have made incalculable contributions to scholarship and economic progress. These outcomes were the result of philanthropic and state action, which facilitated private enterprise. Comprehensive digitisation of printed media will cost a few hundred million dollars – large enough to constitute a commercial entry barrier, so the fear of Google is justified – but tiny relative to existing global library budgets, far less the potential economic benefits of wider reading and better scholarship.
He, like Suzanne Scotchmer at the Global Economic Symposium, and James Boyle in The Public Domain, points us towards thinking seriously about this issue - certainly more so than policymakers who think this debate is only about 'piracy'.