Google Books

For those of you who don't know Google has been scanning books and creating snippets available online for some time now.  This seemed like an innocuous practice until copyright got in the way.  As usual with digital projects copyright likes to rear its ugly head and try to stop great projects.  Now, I understand copyright protects the author's time and investment into their product.  Copyright is great for people who did the work and can get credit, accolades and cash they deserve.  A group of authors bound together to stop the practice of scanning books and making them accessible online.

By now you can probably tell where my bias is, since this is my soapbox I'll come out and say it.  I'm all for making more things available and searchable online.  Apparently U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin agrees with me.  He ultimately dismissed the lawsuit by by the authors which will lead to the future of Google Books project as we know it.

So in conclusion I would like to thank Google for the Google Books project and to U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin (above) for allowing Google Books to continue.

If anybody out there is a published author and has a different opinion about this issue I'd love to hear the other side to better understand the issue.  I believe this is a landmark case for copyright law and I believe it will be interesting to see how this affects other industries.