Whether you agree with him or not, John Kay is always a thought-provoking columnist. On Google books, which he wrote about in his Financial Times column earlier this week, I agree with him completely and as ever he sets out the issues with great clarity. His conclusion is that the global public interest is being overlooked entirely in the court process:

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'.