Awesome! Great ruling, sigh of relief.

Google's response is that they're doing it for the good of many. Well, that's not a reason to trample on other's rights.

Lawman has a nice car, it'd be wonderful if I could grab it and drive all the hobos around on their daily errands. And we could get it done FAST too, because his car smokes. A real boon to society if we could do that. But thankfully, there's laws that say I can't take his car without permission - even if it's good for others to have access to his car, and even if he's parked his car somewhere and I can't get ahold of him to ask his permission.

The thing I liked was the judge did recognize that Google was again trying to snuff out competitors and that's proving disastrous for many in search right now. The DOJ also commented they would likely have to file anti-trust suits because of that.

Also I liked what Arlo Gunthrie’s attorney had to say last year:

a lawyer for folk singer Arlo Guthrie and "Pay it Forward" writer Catherine Ryan Hyde say the library would exploit his clients with "woefully inadequate compensation" for "unknown and undisclosed uses."

People just flat out don’t trust Google anymore and their lament of it’s for the good of everybody. It s just putting more people out of work and fattening Google wallets. It won’t hurt Google in the least because they’ll just claim a new quality re-evaluation for Adwords and raise prices. Meanwhile they’ll be cutting payouts to Adsense publishers to get over the bump.

I just want some type of settlement. There are a huge number of books in limbo: books that are out of print and not available used. Often the ownership of the copyright is murky at best and trying to locate the author and/or copyright holder is pretty much impossible.

And thanks to Disney, they will never become Public Domain.

I just want some type of settlement. There are a huge number of books in limbo: books that are out of print and not available used. Often the ownership of the copyright is murky at best and trying to locate the author and/or copyright holder is pretty much impossible.

A book's copyright being in limbo or just unavailable for someone to use in a fashion that's denied by copyright, isn't a reason for breaking copyright.

there's a certain time period in most westernized countries I'm familiar with where it's clear it's out of copyright. In the US, prior to 1923 it's almost certainly out of copyright. Newer than that, and books can be in limbo. But that's just tough - nobody needs to be copying books published by others in the last 90 years without express permission. That's one of the defining characteristics behind copyright - it's default is copyright. Not default to 'I can't tell, so I want there to be no copyright'.

People need to start treating other people's written works like a tangible product, not something you can lift just because you want to.