Google’s Complete Plays Of Shakespeare Less Than Compleat by Phil Bradley, Search Engine Watch, Jun. 14, 2006.
The Google blog ‘Inside Google Book Search’ announced … that it is now possible to explore Shakespeare with Google – The complete plays of Shakespeare now at your fingertips. Well no, not exactly….
I could read 13 of the plays Google listed, but was unable to do so for another 24.
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I think Mr. Bradley is missing the point. As I see it, Google made Shakespeare’s works available via Book Search as a publicity stunt — partly to get people to notice Book Search and to use it, but also as a way of making people more aware of the idiosyncrasies of copyright law with which Google is currently struggling. Rather than directing his frustration at Google for not publishing Shakespeare’s works in their entirety, he should be questioning why it is that a play written over 400 years ago could still be under copyright at all.