Al Jazeera America Presents: Google and the World Brain

In 1937 the science fiction writer H.G. Wells predicted the creation of a "World Brain," which would contain all the world's knowledge and be accessible to all mankind. This all-knowing entity would replace nation-states and governments. Prophetically, Wells anticipated that it would be powerful enough 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 have plans as bold, far-reaching and transformative as Google does with its Google Books project.

In 2002, Google began scanning the world's books. It signed deals with major libraries — the Bodleian Library in Britain, the Catalonian National Library in Spain and Michigan's, Harvard's and Stanford's in the United States. Its 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 it develop a new form of artificial intelligence.

Google scanned 10 million books, but there was one big problem: More than half those books, 6 million of them, were under copyright. Around the world, authors launched a campaign against Google.  In 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 Books settlement — 350 pages long — unveiled in October 2008.

The $125 million settlement conferred on Google dramatic new privileges. The Google Books website was to become both the world's biggest bookstore and a commercialized library, giving Google a monopoly over the majority of books published in the 20th century. The Harvard library withdrew its support. The German and French governments spoke out against it. The U.S. Department of Justice began an antitrust investigation.

Beginning in 2009, Judge Denny Chin held hearings in New York to assess the validity of the Google Books settlement. In March 2011 he ruled against it.

Since then, Google has signed individual deals with many publishers allowing it to show parts of their books online with links to websites. Google is still scanning out-of-copyright books as well, but the company's master plan to create an exclusive library whose terms and conditions it can determine has been effectively stopped. Today the Authors Guild is suing Google for up to $2 billion in damages for scanning copyrighted books.

In the end, a ragtag 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.