The world's information can't all be made universally accessible and useful if laws restrict certain access and/or uses.

Just sayin'

Google's mission is to be THE premier adware vendor in the world, and so the "universal access to information" is just so much collateral fodder – keep that in mind. Google-the-company can not transcend the existing IP-frameworks in place, technological or national. Nor should we want or expect it to.

That said, the IP [intellectual property] laws have once come into being to protect originators of intangible goods, ie. authors and composers, from unrestricted exploitation by third-party duplicators... something that used to be the norm, rather than exception. Once legislated and made universally executable, these laws also tend to act as Occam's razor for talent – the few best-selling autors get well paid, while the hordes of also-rans and graphomaniacs underwrite the existence of various vanity presses and the like... everybody H-A-P-P-Y™. Then come paradigm shifts in techology and content distribution (not yet presentation, but it is coming as well); confusion ensues, a.k.a. The Present.

Still, if there is an Original Sin of the Internet, it must be its founders' initial inattention to, or lack of interest for the eventual division of the spoils. Leaf-node content creators, the ones that –for better or worse– make the bulk of the web, are the ones that have been entirely left out. Early-days calls for implementing micropayments (=as understood in pre-1990 times, www-reading charges on the scale of, say, 0.0001 US¢ per word of content; see Jakob Nielsen, http://useit.com/alertbox/980125.html), and visionary concepts such as Ted Nelson's uniform per-byte-charge transclusion/ Xanadu [http://google.com/search?q=micropayments+xanadu] went unheeded.

Google knows that the only way they may affect real [r]evolutionary change in existing IP laws is by making the majority of creators aware that there is value in volume –the fashionable Long Tail and its derivates– as opposed to current value-in-exceptions- to-the-rule. And that means implementing some kind of micropayments, for want of a better word [NOT AdWord ;-))]. Let us just hope Micro$haft won't get there first, because they are the only other party suitably big for unilateral deployment of disruptive new technology on that scale, and they have a track record of Royally Screwing It Up.