POLAR STAR FILMS & B.L.T.V present “ GOOGLE AND THE WORLD BRAIN ” Directed by BEN LEWIS 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Official Selection Duration: 89 minutes Screening Format: HDCAM Shooting Format: XDCAM 1080p25 Video/Audio: Colour/Stereo Language: 90% English Director Ben Lewis Executive Producer Carles Brugueras Producer Bettina Walter Editor Simon Barker Director of Photography Frank-Peter Lehmann Music Lucas Ariel Vallejos
Google and the World Brain directed by Ben Lewis ( World Cinema Documentary Competition) Berlin. Photo by Ben Lewis, Alexis Gallardo. LOG LINE The story of Google’s most ambitious project ever and the people who are trying to stop it. SYNOPSIS In 1937 the science fiction writer HG Wells predicted the creation of a “World Brain”, which would contain all the world's knowledge and be accessible to all of mankind. This all-knowing entity would replace nation states and governments. Prophetically, HG Wells anticipated that the quantity of information that it would possess, would allow it to monitor every human being on the planet. Today this World Brain is being brought into existence on the Internet. Wikipedia, Facebook, Baidu in China and other search engines around the world are all trying to build their own world brains - but none had a plan as bold, far-reaching and transformative as Google did with it’s Google Books project. In 2002, Google began scanning the world’s books. They signed deals with major university libraries - Michigan, Harvard and Stanford in America, the Bodleian library in Britain and the Catalonian National Library in Spain. Their goal was not just to create a giant global library, but to use all that knowledge for a higher and more secretive purpose: to help them develop a new form of Artificial Intelligence. Google scanned ten million books, but there was one big problem: over half those books, six million of them, were in copyright. Across the world, authors launched a campaign against Google. In Autumn 2005, The Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers filed lawsuits. Soon they and Google sat down to try to work out an agreement. Three years later, the result was the Google Book Settlement, all 350 pages of it, unveiled in October 2008. But the $125m Google Book Settlement conferred on Google dramatic new powers. The Google Books Website was to become both the world’s biggest book store and a commercialised library, giving Google a monopoly over the majority of books published in the twentieth century. Harvard library withdrew its support. The German and French governments spoke out against it. The American Department of Justice began an anti-trust investigation. From Autumn 2009 onwards, Judge Denny Chin held hearings in New York to assess the validity of the Google Book Settlement. In March 2011, he ruled against it. Since then Google has signed individual deals with many publishers allowing them to show parts of their books on-line with links to websites. Google are also still scanning out-of-copyright books as well, but their master plan to create an exclusive library whose terms and conditions they could determine has been effectively stopped. Today, the Authors Guild is suing Google for up to $2bn in damages for scanning copyrighted books. In the end a ragbag army of authors helped by the occasional librarian defeated one of the world's most powerful corporations. In this film the central story of Google Books is woven into the broader fabric of the Internet, with its issues of data-mining and privacy, downloading and copyright, freedom and surveillance.
GOOGLE AND THE WORLD BRAIN (WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION): FILM CLIPS (VO): " Clip #1" - " Clip #2" - " Clip #3" -