Page 183 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Government Censorsh p and Freedom of Speech

it to dominate the future of the search field. Though great potential comes from
digitally preserving books and making them accessible online, Google’s part-
nership with prominent libraries raises considerable concern about copyright
violations, the future of libraries, the role of publishers in a digital era, and the
privacy of user searches. It remains to be seen whether this billion-dollar ven-
ture will revolutionize—or compromise—the way we search for information.
see also Advertising and Persuasion; Communication Rights in a Global Con-
text; Internet and its Radical Potential; Net Neutrality; Online Publishing;
Piracy and Intellectual Property; Public Sphere; Surveillance and Privacy.
Further reading: Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules
of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Penguin, 2005; Besser, Howard.
“Commodification of Culture Harms Creators.” Presentation for the American Library
Association Wye River Retreat on Information Commons, October 2001, http://www.
gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Copyright/ala-commons.html; Cohen, Adam. “What Google
Should Roll Out Next: A Privacy Upgrade.” New York Times, November 28, 2005, http://
www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/opinion/28mon4.html; Cowan, Alison Leigh. “Books for
Lending, Data for Taking.” New York Times, November 20, 2005, http://www.nytimes.
com/2005/11/20/weekinreview/20cowan.html; Gandy, Oscar H. The Panoptic Sort: A
Political Economy of Personal Information. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993; Leonhardt,
David. “The Internet Knows What You’ll Do Next.” New York Times, July 5, 2006, http://
www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/business/05leonhardt.html; Markoff, John, and Edward
Wyatt. “Technology; Google Is Adding Major Libraries to its Database.” New York
Times, December 14, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.
html; Robins, Kevin, and Frank Webster. Times of the Technoculture. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1999; Shenk, David. “A Growing Web of Watchers Builds a Surveillance Society.”
New York Times, January 25, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/technology/
techspecial2/25essay.html; “The Battle Over Books: Authors and Publishers Take On the
Google Print Library Project.” Live at The New York Public Library, November 17, 2005,
http://www.nypl.org/research/calendar/imagesprog/google111705.pdf; Vaidhyanathan,
Siva. “A Risky Gamble with Google.” Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no.15 (Decem-
ber 2, 2005): B7–B10; Wray, Richard, and Dan Milmo. “Publishers Unite against Google.”
The Guardian, July 6, 2006, http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,1813439,00.html.

Paul Vinelli

goVernMent CensorshiP and
FreedoM oF sPeeCh
Freedom of speech is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy. The
right to express ourselves free from government censorship is a fundamental
individual liberty, one that Americans hold dear as a defining feature of our na-
tion. However, in a large country with a diverse population, living together in
freedom requires of us a great deal of tolerance. A national commitment to free-
dom of speech means freedom of speech for everyone, even those with whom
we disagree, even those whose ideas we feel are dangerous. For this reason, the
United States has long had a remarkably ambivalent relationship with freedom
of speech, defending it at times, dispensing with it at others.