This is patently false. Under the settlement, any book for whom the rights holder can be established, said rights holder has the right to pull the book from the google book search for whatever retarded reason they have justified this to themselves. The only 'special' right google has is to redistribute works for which the rights holder cannot be found.

This is in practice a very small percentage of the works, as the rights holders are actively being sought out by the author's guild.

The idea that works that have intellectual value should be kept away from the public because it has become functionally impossible to find the person who has the rights is a blatant violation of the copyright clause, which states:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

How does keeping something secret from the public when a work has been abandoned promote the progress of the useful arts?

What they did wrong was try to make books more available to individuals, and easy to search. The people crying over this are upset because they feel that their product being more available, easier to find and easier to buy clearly represents a copyright infringement.

Scanning the world's libraries and making the material available is clearly quite possibly one of the most individually empowering acts in history, as it will put far more *good* information into the hands of everyone. This is unacceptable because this is an industry based on artificial scarcity.

As for the exclusivity issue, why is it Google's job to negotiate rights for everyone else? Clearly this is creating a template, and any other business that wants to go through the monumental task of scanning millions of works should have no problem securing the same deal. This is just a smoke screen put up by people who don't want the mass of humanity to have good access to the materials in teh best libraries in the world.

Publishers and most authors *hate* libraries. They *hate* the idea that a book can be read by more then one person, and they *hate* people sharing the ideas from works without paying for the privledge of the knowledge. This is an industry that has been activly hostile to the first sale doctrine, and that has been positivly drooling at the idea that they can sell books to people covered in thick layers of DRM so that they can end the library loophole.

I'm positivly shocked to see most of slashdot actively siding with a group of people who are today celebrating the scuttling of a deal that would make books far more available to the world, and did so for their own anti-intellectual, anti-consumer, pro-drm reasons.

My 2c, this review is entirely the norm for the rails community.

This is a community of 'developers' who spend (so far as I can tell) the vast majority of their time coming up with names (rails, merb, cucumber, etc) and writing blog posts (yes, I get the irony of pointing at *his* blog) about how badass they think are, while writing trivial libraries and using that to trumpet how 1337 they they think they are. Both this review and likely this book should be passed up, along with the rails community as a whole.

*Clue*, when looking for a development community, look for a group of people who spend time *coding* at their conventions instead of a development community who spends the vast majority of their time grandstanding about how awesome they thing they are.

This is practically turning into a low digit uid convention.

I bet there hasn't been this many comments by people with uids with less then 6 digits in years.