Comments on: Alex MacGillivray explains the Google Books settlement

By: Zuckerman ‘93 on Google Books : EphBlog

Zuckerman ‘93 on Google Books : EphBlog — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:57:59 +0000

[...] Zuckerman ‘93 provides an interesting update/overview of Google Books. So far, Google has scanned more than 10 million books. That quantity of books [...]

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:48:48 +0000

Darius, sorry the post was unclear on that point. Researchers will own their IP when working with the Google corpus. That means that it would be possible to build a machine translation company at Harvard using the Google corpus, spin it out and monetize it without owing any IP to Google.

There’s another question, which is whether it’s reasonable for academic researchers to try to compete with Google’s in-house team on the subject of machine translation. I think it is, and I think that deciding not to compete with Google will guarantee fulfillment of a prophecy that Google will dominate machine translation in the future… :-)

By: Andry

Andry — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:43:58 +0000

Is there a world after Google?

By: Darius Cuplinskas

Darius Cuplinskas — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:52:22 +0000

This is fascinating – thanks for blogging the discussion in such fine-grained detail.

I wonder if your conclusion that “Google [doesn't] have an insurmountable lead in machine translation and [so won't] obviate other efforts in the near future” follows from what he said. It’s fantastic that the entire corpus will be made available for computational analysis by research centers at partner libraries, but — would they be able to do anything other than pure research with it? Would anyone, for example, be able to set up a for-profit translation business using the corpus? If not, that still leaves Google with a huge competitive advantage.

cheers,
Darius