Google has won a major victory in the long legal fight over its scanning and searching of millions of books.
A federal judge, Denny Chin, ruled
on Thursday that Google's use of copyrighted works in its Google Books
program counts as fair use, and he dismissed a lawsuit originally
brought by authors and publishers groups in 2005.
Early reaction from researchers and librarians to Thursday's decision
was enthusiastic. "A great day for fair use!" tweeted Matthew L.
Jockers, a digital humanist who is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "Let the text mining begin!"
