I spent Friday at Harvard! Well, I spent Friday watching the webcast of Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraries in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement: An Open Workshop at Harvard Law School, July 31, 2009 Sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Harvard Law School Library, and Professors Charles Nesson, John Palfrey and Phil Malone: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/googlebooks/Main_Page. I also watched the Twitter stream (#gbsworkshop09), and spent some time playing with Google Book Search and reading more about the issues (see GBS in my delicious tags).

After three days spent searching, reading, and pondering, I am, once again, stunned by the information to which I had access from my home office. Clearly, this is yet another example of creation of knowledge not for monetary gain but for the benefit of society. Of course, the various stakeholders in this issue (both those represented in the settlement and, perhaps more important, those excluded from it) have vested interests in widely sharing their points of view. Nevertheless, this is yet another example of why intellectual property rights are not the only values we should consider in analyzing uses of digital media.