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Documentary explores Google as brain trust

Google and the World Brain Where: Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad St. When: Wednesday, 7 p.m.

Google and the World Brain

Where: Victoria Event Centre, 1415 Broad St.

When: Wednesday, 7 p.m.

Admission: By donation ($10-$20 suggested)

Info: 250-381-4428

Rating: Two and a half stars (out of five)

How’s this for irony? Chances are Ben Lewis, while researching Google and the World Brain, had to rely on Google’s flagship search engine for information to help him take the computer giant to task.

Irony is a key ingredient in the British filmmaker’s documentary that takes its title from the “World Brain” futurist H.G. Wells envisioned in 1937 — a massive, publicly accessible depository of knowledge.

With Google Books, the company is transforming what was once science-fiction into reality. It’s a mammoth endeavour, with more than 10 million books, six-million in copyright, scanned into an online, publicly accessible library since 2004, when Google entered into agreements with several research libraries to digitize current and out-of-print works.

Lewis’s provocative if alarmist documentary toggles between the potential benefits of Google’s searchable digital database, and less-than-subtle suggestions — frankly laughable at times — that its agenda is more sinister than helpful.

Not that there isn’t cause for concern. Time waits for no one in the Internet age, so the computer giant took a big gamble by scanning copyrighted books without permission, claiming it could do so under copyright’s “fair use” doctrine.

It sparked a 2005 class-action lawsuit by the Authors Guild, a coalition of publishers and authors.

When someone suggests Google “could hold the whole world hostage” with its audacious initiative, the film goes over the top. Talking heads include scholars, researchers and librarians, notably Jean-Noël Jeanneny, colourful former head of the French National Library who decries Google’s apparent English-language bias; author Lewis Hyde; and computer scientist Jaron Lanier.

It’s a pity Lewis relies so much on external commentary, much of it redundant, preventing this conventional and subjective doc from being a livelier, more engaging journey. Cheesy animation depicting speakers quoted in articles or court documents doesn’t help. Still, there’s plenty of food for thought about the pros and cons of digitizing printed material.

Token references to Apple and Facebook as other entities accused of questionable business practices don’t quite cut it as balance. While Lewis has some interesting things to say about whether one company should control so much intellectual property, he over-relies on speculation — apparently since Google denied him access to operations he evidently felt entitled to.

With our increasingly insatiable appetite for faster, cheaper information in the Internet age, it’s no wonder entities like Google, through which I’ve often found my own copyrighted work freely scalped and shared on umpteen websites, flourish.

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can find ways to mitigate such dizzyingly global changes.

The best that can be said about Lewis’s flawed but fascinating film is it’s an effective catalyst for such conversations.

Is Google more villain or visionary? You be the judge.

With U.S. Circuit federal judge Denny Chin’s Nov. 14 dismissal of the Authors Guild’s long-running copyright infringement lawsuit — he wrote Google’s “transformative” use of “snippets” of text constituted “fair use” under copyright law — Open Cinema’s post-screening discussion moderated by Peter Sandmark, executive director of MediaNet, should be stimulating.

Panelists are Dave Obee, Times Colonist editor-in-chief and author of The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia; David Leach, associate professor, Technology and Society, UVic Dept. of Writing; and law librarian and blogger Kim Nayyer.

mreid@timescolonist.com