The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.
Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."
So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.
Can this be used as precedent to dismiss all the pending RIAA and MPAA lawsuits? What about reversing past suits whose victims are already in the body count?
Don't I wish.
Sure they do - all the major web servers and hosting platforms can use and define vhosts (it's just that the mechanism for creating them differs on each platform). IIS for example, if you create a new site, using "All IP Addresses" port 80, will require that you designate a host header so that the HTTP engine can route the request to the right Web Site (and corresponding content). All IP Addresses port 80 with an empty Host Header acts as a "catch-all" and is assigned to the Default Web Site. Which you generally disable, and create your own config for, if you know what you're doing. Apache, on the other hand, configures those vhosts in text files (nowadays under sites-enabled, as I recall). But the functionality is all there on pretty much all major platforms.
Now if you're arguing that the administrators of IIS servers are exponentially less likely to have a clue about host headers, when compared to their Apache/nginx counterparts - well then from my experience you're absolutely right (my history is MS consulting, and the number of IIS admins who want 20 IP addresses for 20 sites because they don't get how to do host headers, DNS resolution etc, cannot be counted - the reverse can be counted on both hands over 20 years of doing this stuff).
No, it means anecdotal evidence is to be taken as better than no evidence whatsoever. Not everything is black and white, one side of the fence or t'other.
Consider this as a scale - Peer reviewed, multiple-source reproducible trumps anecdotal evidence, but anecdotal evidence is still better than the absence of any evidence on either side.
Cop 1: "He looked like he was hiding something, yer onner". When we stopped him he kept looking around and acting strangely."
Cop 2: "Yeah, yeah, wot he said."
You: "I did no such thing, your honour."
Judge: Both cops say you did, 2 trusted public officials with no reason to lie against 1 obvious reprobate, probable cause, case dismissed with prejudice.
Except the fuckers crashed my machine when they pushed out the update.
Citation needed, since I recall no such major outcry. Your machine is probably one of the ones with 25 browser toolbars, or ten download accelerators, or fifty outdated browser plugins, or a couple of undetected rookits etc., which is usually the reason behind a security patch "crashing your machine".
And if Windows closed the app with unsaved work, you'd be here whinging that Microsoft destroyed your work. And if you really gave a crap, you'd go in and change the Windows Update setting from "Automatically install" to "Ask me first".
Microsoft has done some seriously stupid stuff. And some bad stuff. But if you want to abuse them, at least abuse them for the stupid stuff not the sane stuff.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne