Open knowledge and the National Digital Library in the US

Well written piece in the NYRB. And as for doing no evil, nice quote about Google’s attempt to order (or close) the world:

They agreed on a settlement, which transformed Google’s original enterprise, a search service that would display only short snippets of the books, into a commercial library. By purchasing subscriptions, research libraries would gain access to Google’s database—that is, to digitized copies of the books that they had already provided to Google free of charge and that they now could make available to their readers at a price to be set by Google and its new partners. To some of us, Google Book Search looked like a new monopoly of access to knowledge. To the Southern Federal District Court of New York, it was riddled with so many unacceptable provisions that it could not stand up in law.

I wonder what the equivalent could do for teaching and learning in medicine.