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Watch: Trailer for Sundance Documentary 'Google and the World Brain'

by Ethan Anderton
January 8, 2013
Source: The Documentary Channel

The 2013 Sundance Film Festival is just over a week today, and we're busy figuring out all of our coverage to bring you the buzz on the latest indies in Park City, Utah. Another day, and another trailer for one of the selected films has arrived. This time it's a documentary entry called Google and the World Brain. The short festival synopsis reads: "In the most ambitious project ever conceived on the Internet, Google has been scanning the world's books for 10 years. They said the intention was to build a giant digital library, but that involved scanning millions of copyrighted works." Director Ben Lewis says his intention was to "make a film that alerted an audience to perils, as well as the paradise of the Internet." Watch below!

First trailer for Ben Lewis' documentary Google and the World Brain via The Documentary Channel:

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? Google and the World Brain from director Ben Lewis aims to answer that question with this film premiering at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

Filed under Sundance 13, To Watch, Trailers

From around the web:

thedudeabides

hmm, fascinating..
Dave

Sponsored by Bing
- ty
  
  lol that made my day
http://www.facebook.com/kevinbingham Kevin 'Bynk' Bingham

> Quietly and behind closed doors, > webmasters are reinventing the limits of copyright in the name of free access to anyone, anywhere Hmmm, I detect a high potential for FUD here. Google has never been quiet about it. They introduced Google Book Search at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. Hardly quiet. And webmasters reinventing the limit of copyright? Who are these webmasters? I don't think Google was out to change copyright. Unfortunately they did get into legal problems with their scanning project. Their intent was to give the ability to search printed material like you can search web material. What they have done is very progressive. I hope the documentary is impartial, showing the various sides to this matter.
- wafffles
  
  I hope it's impartial too, but you can't downplay the fact that they are undermining copyrights. They're intent may very well be noble, but the fact remains that authors aren't moonlighters, they make a living from what they write. You may hold a grudge against the publishing house 'middle man', but writers can't be collateral damage. When a new novel goes on sale at Barnes and Noble for $12.95 and simultaneously gets uploaded by Google for free, how many people are really going to pay and help support the author? And when story tellers, poets, essayists and journalists have no way to make a living from what they write, they stop writing and go work in an office somewhere. Perhaps they weren't "out to change copyright" but that's what they are doing. Of course it's progressive, and a downright amazing feat, but collecting every book ever written isn't quite so forward thinking if it also undermines the future of the printed word. Anywayyyyy, it does look like an interesting film, and might I add, some of those visuals are quite impressive. Beautiful, even.
Zeus

Seems ironic that this is a YouTube clip...
http://twitter.com/PolarBear26J Joshua Abbott

Maybe there is a different message than portrayed by the trailer...but god this reminds me of that video I had to watch in chemistry when I was a teen, where it looks like a movie made by high school students about how important oil is...but was in fact was contributed too by every major oil company out there. This sure sounds like Random House, Penguin, and the rest toting there copyright line as a movie.
http://profiles.google.com/snears Nick Sears

I love how this is posted on the first day of CES...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7YGEVuJ4mM Carpola

Some of the more scary things with Google is the how an ad for a product you mentioned in an email can pop up on an unrelated website like this one, or say you were talking about painting and you are visiting a newspaper site and all the ads relate to art materials. I do check sites like Archive.org a lot, they have an amazing archive of out of print books, that are worth a look. People moan about freedom of information, but do Google not charge for that information? They aren't scanning that stuff for fun.
David Banner

Sounds like a discarded Alex Jones idea for a 10min segment on 1 of his shows. And he has a lot of shows.
http://twitter.com/donovan Donovan Greene

This seems very melodramatic to the point of ridiculous. Google can't hold the world hostage, nor does it want to. I love cinema, but this is using drama as a drug.
http://www.facebook.com/WingcommanderIV Andrew Geczy

"A book is not just a really long tweet?" And why isn't it. In both cases you get an idea, and express it with words. A story is a story, whether it's 160 words, or 160,000.
lando

not to be an alarmist, but there is a certain truth to this notion, in Europe Google was found guilty of copying any data that was on unlocked networks while roaming to take pictures for street view. they have been found to be doing more than just filtering data to provide us with ads..