Robert McCrum says that while it seems like all the e-challenges have changed the game, they’re really just part of a bigger battle being fought across the ages… Undoubtedly by those little people from Time Bandits. If you forced me to guess. Or Jean Claude Van Damme. He’s always involved with some sort of time travel. Or is that heroin? I can never remember. No, no. Auto-erotic asphyxiation. That’s it.

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.