Alexandra Alter, writing for the New York Times:

A United States appeals court ruled on Friday that Google’s effort to build a digital library of millions of books was “fair use” and did not infringe on the copyrights of authors.

The ruling affirmed a decision that was reached two years ago in a lower court. In that case, the court rejected the claims by the Authors Guild, a writers’ organization, that Google’s book scanning project is a commercial venture that violates authors’ copyrights and drives down sales by making portions of their work available online free.

From the Google Books Wikipedia page:

The Google Books initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online body of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge. But it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations, and lack of editing to correct the many errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process.

I’ve got a number of titles in there. Doesn’t bother me. But I do wish the process was opt-in instead of opt-out. In other words, I wish Google would assume I don’t want my book scanned and ask me for permission, rather than force me to discover that a book I wrote is part of this program and then jump through hoops to get it removed.

Not certain how this works, but I believe this project brings a revenue stream to Google, that this is not purely a work for the good of humanity. Anyone know the details of that?