John Lancaster's "Who Owns What in the Digital Age" in the Guardian is a great overview of copyright and books and the whole Google Books project. It's worth a peruse. "The idea of copyright began as an argument over books; and it is over books, both as intellectual property and as physical entities, that change and contention now looms. The revolutionary impact of the internet on the music and film business is plain to see. Now it's the turn of the printed word. The question is simple, and far-reaching: what's going to happen to books and to the people who write them? And if it was books that first caused the whole idea of intellectual property to be raised, might it not be through books that we can see some promising ways through the murk, towards a future that is not dominated by corporate interests?"
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