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We're gearing up for the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, which begins next week in Park City, Utah. I'd put Sundance as my single favorite film-related event of the year, and GeekTyrant is going to be there in full force this year bringing you written and video reviews, video blogs, and all sorts of coverage of the best the fest has to offer.
One of the movies that is playing there is a documentary called Google and the World Brain, and it's about Google's quest to archive every piece of learned information that humanity has achieved. They began scanning millions of books, but copyright issues forced this quiet attempt into the limelight. Check it out below:
Here's the official synopsis, from the Sundance 2013 website:
The goal of accumulating all human knowledge in one repository has been a dream since ancient times. Only recently, however, has that dream become a reality. Quietly and behind closed doors, Google has been executing a project to scan and digitize every printed word on the planet. Working with the world’s most prestigious libraries, the webmasters are reinventing the limits of copyright in the name of free access to anyone, anywhere. What can possibly be wrong with this picture?
As Google and the World Brain reveals, a whole lot. Some argue that Google’s actions represent aggressive theft on an enormous scale, others see them as an attempt to monopolize our shared cultural heritage, and still others view the project as an attempt to flatten our minds by consolidating complex ideas into searchable “extra-long tweets.” At first slowly, and then with intensifying conviction, a diverse coalition mobilizes to stop the fulfillment of this ambitious dream. Incisive and riveting as it uncovers a high-stakes multinational heist, Ben Lewis’s film voices an important alternative to the technological utopianism of our time.
