Just for once, Google has been given a bloody nose  The court
ruling on the company's digitisation plans is welcome, but
there's a common-sense compromise     • The Observer,     • Jump
to comments ()  Last week, a US judge in Manhattan made a
landmark decision. As to what it means, opinions vary. Some see
it as arresting the cultural progress that began with the
Enlightenment; others are celebrating Judge Denny Chin's ruling
as the blocking of a predatory move by a giant corporation to
control access to the world's cultural heritage. The truth, as
always, lies somewhere in between.  First, the backstory. In
2004, Google decided that it would digitise all the books
currently held in a series of major libraries with the aim of
making their contents globally available to anyone with a web
browser. The project was the brainchild of Larry Page, one of
Google's two founders, who is soon to become the company's CEO.
It was a typical Google project – audacious, difficult and
fiendishly expensive – but one that fitte