Lions and tigers and bears! A good primer on the copyright wars so far. Our embedded reporter, of course, was not allowed to publish her findings because the copyright to the word “war” is now owned by Fox News.

Last May, Kevin Kelly, Wired magazine’s “senior maverick,” published in The New York Times Magazine his predictive account of flux within the book-publishing world. Kelly outlined what he claimed will happen (not might or could — will) to the practices of writing and reading under a new regime fostered by Google’s plan to scan millions of books and offer searchable texts to Internet users.

“So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas?” Kelly wrote. “First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. . . . Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority . . . .”
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As it turns out, the move toward universal knowledge is not so easy. Google’s project, if it survives court challenges, would probably have modest effects on writing, reading, and publishing. For one thing, Kelly’s predictions depend on a part of the system he slights in his article: the copyright system. Copyright is not Kelly’s friend. He mentions it as a nuisance on the edge of his dream. To acknowledge that a lawyer-built system might trump an engineer-built system would have run counter to Kelly’s sermon.