Thoughts on the demise of Google's newspaper-archiving plan

San Francisco alternative publication blogger and writer Irving Muchnick offers some thoughts on the demise of Google's plan to digitize the nation's newspaper past. They're surprising in that they show the gray areas of this project, which generated such heat. He addresses the need for payment of writers for their past work and decries the Google-type plan where only companies get paid while pointing out the need for some coherent national policy. An earlier piece by the Boston Phoenix, another alternative publication, offers some light on the demise of the Google plan.