We'll Fight For Our Right to Obscurity!

I meant to link earlier to computer guru Tim O'Reilly's fine New York Times op-ed about the Authors Guild's short-sighted, self-defeating lawsuit against the Google Print Library Project. O'Reilly explains:

Google has partnered with the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library and Oxford University. Google will scan and index their library collections, so that when a reader searches Google Print for, say, "author's rights," the results point to books that contain that term. In a format that resembles its current Web search results, Google will show snippets (typically, fewer than three sentences of text from each page of each book) that include the search term, plus information about the book and where to find it. Google asserts that displaying this limited amount of content is protected by the "fair use" doctrine under United States copyright law; the Authors Guild claims that it is infringement, because the underlying search technology requires a digitized copy of the entire work.

I'm not sufficiently well versed in the intricacies of copyright law to know who's got the stronger legal claim, but as a practical matter, it seems fairly obvious that what Google's doing is highly unlikely to displace book sales or otherwise diminish author royalties, but very likely indeed to connect potential buyers with books they'd otherwise have been unaware of. This seems as silly as trying to stop reviewers quoting a book.