Google, omniscient creator of all things cool on the internet, has embarked on a nifty new project: making snippets from books available for searching on Google. For instance, if you search for “somnambulist pineapple” on Google, not only will you get only every webpage containing that term (one), but you would also get any book ever published that mentioned that term. Cool, eh? Also debatably legal. Or illegal, depending on your point view. Google has accordingly and predictably been sued. The plaintiff is the Authors Guild.

There are several arguments here.

1. Google is doing the same thing a library does, except online. No, libraries buy their copy, and thus have a right to reproduce it along fair use guidelines.

2. This would discourage people from buying books. Do libraries discourage people from buying books? Does the radio discourage people from buying music? Does the internet? We may not have an answer of the last one, but that’s the basic idea. Also, Google only displays a small snippet – one or two sentences – around the searched term. You’d theoretically have to piece together a book snippet by snippet.

3. Google isn’t selling the books, so there’s no problem. But they’re making money on advertisements that come from the authors’ content being displayed to the user. So yeah, they are making money.

4. Google is doing the same thing it does to web sites: indexing. Sort of. Websites are always offered for free… most of them, at least. Books are not offered for free.

So what should happen? Google should pay for each of the books it indexes. It would then have a right to fair use. That Google makes money from ads is an incidental byproduct. They make money on ads for every Google product, or service, or whatever we call the things Google creates. At most, consider it as compensation for directing web-searches to books. At least at that point, the user will discover a book they might have not discovered, and never bought.

Via Lessig.