Google took a temporary retreat today in its plan to make available for free countless thousands of copyrighted books without the copyright holders' permissions. It's started displaying the contents of books from its Google Print book-scanning project --- but it's not showing the contents of copyrighted books.

Jesus H. Monkeyballs, shut the fuck up Preston Gralla. This dude's on a crusade as if Google's planning to post the full text of each book on a web page. There is simply NO FUCKING WAY someone's gonna reconstruct whole books out of this. And if they do figure out a way, *FINE* then we have a problem.

He's not even arguing that it's a misuse because they plan to profit off of someone elses work (although i think that's kind of a stretch of an argument in the first place). He's actually concerned that this is like a Napster for books where no one will ever have to buy anything ever again.

Totally asinine. Fuck the authors guild and the major publishers for the same reasons that I say Fuck RIAA and the MPAA. Rather than finding some common ground with new technology they want to cement the current business stucture for eternity. It won't fucking work, and the longer and harder you fight, the worse off EVERYONE IN THE WORLD is.