What Happens When Larry and Sergey Die?

That's the question on the mind of Robert Darnton, who runs Harvard University's library system. For years, the Google Book Search project has digitized millions of books from libraries around the world, running into copyright law and a class action lawsuit from the Association of American Publishers in the process. When Google reached a tentative settlement of the suit in October, Darnton got nervous and refused to abide by the settlement; at least, not until he studied it a little more. Now, after poring through all 134 pages and 15 appendices, he's feeling even queasier and has written a lengthy explication of his fears (what he calls a tension between "jeremiad" and "utopian enthusiasm") in the New York Review of Books. Google, Darnton ultimately worries, cannot be trusted. Because the history of literature and publishing since the Enlightenment shows that no one, however noble, can be trusted with control of the entire corpus of human thought.

Cast your minds back to those heady days of Rousseau and Jefferson and Voltaire, where the spirit of free inquiry was crystallized and enshrined. Writers and thinkers fought over critical ideas of science, politics, freedom, and human nature in journals and letters and books, and the best argument won in true meritocratic fashion. Except, of course, the world never looked like that. Rather, money and power always got in the way and dominated intellectual life. Royal and aristocratic patrons bought the services of Europe's writers. State censors approved the content of publications. Salons and academies were hotbeds of petty intrigues. The printers' guilds could keep books from ever seeing the light of day. From the start, the ideals of free inquiry and universal access to knowledge ran up against the need for writers and publishers to make a living.

Enter another key element of the Enlightenment: copyright law. First begun in Great Britain and imported into the fledgling American republic, copyright was always designed to balance the proprietary interest of authors with the public interest in spreading knowledge; the resulting compromise set copyright as extending for a maximum of 28 years. Except, of course, the compromise wouldn't last. In 1998, just as Disney's Mickey Mouse character was about to revert to the public domain, Congress extended the life of copyrights by decades. Books published after Jan. 1, 1923, are largely outside public domain and will be so for a generation. When it comes to ideas and the printed word, Darnton writes, "we live in a world designed by Mickey Mouse, red in tooth and claw."

Even in the ostensibly less mercenary world of the academy, the currents of money and power inevitably clashed with the mission of disseminating knowledge far and wide. Take the professional journals, Darnton writes. Once publishers thought up the idea of offering subscriptions to university libraries, they soon realized that they could charge whatever they wanted, and the libraries' customers—professors, students, and researchers who had grown accustomed to free access to the journals and submitted work for free in order to boost their prestige—would howl if the library ever said no. Faced with skyrocketing subscription prices (annual price for the Journal of Comparative Neurology: $25,910), library acquisition budgets starved and key academic monographs died for lack of demand. Money both drove academic inquiry and stifled it.

This model eerily prefigures the terms of Google's settlement with authors and publishers, and that's what gets Darnton so worked up. Here's how the book project will work for all works that don't fall into the public domain. For books that are copyrighted but out of print, Google will sell subscriptions to universities, libraries, and ordinary consumers, who can access and print the work for a fee, to be split between Google and the copyright owners. This means that everyday folks and small, isolated institutions around the globe can access books from the world's greatest libraries. But only on Google's terms.

With this settlement, Google has essentially guaranteed that no other company or government or philanthropic foundation will ever create a rival digital library. Because copyright holders are being treated as a class by the courts, no rival will be able to embark upon the same digitization process without negotiating separately with each holder or getting embroiled in a similarly lengthy and expensive class action lawsuit. Remember: Copyright now largely extends to almost every work published since 1923. No organization except for Google will ever have the resources and the will to go through this, which cedes the entire field of digital human knowledge to Google.