Google to Risk Copyright Law Violation with Library Indexing

Despite threats for copyright law violation, Google is continuing to index the world's libraries and allow some of their contents to be put online.

Critics say that indexing libraries and books that could have possibly been on shelves for many years would take away business from libraries and some companies. Other publishers and authors that are for the idea claim extra publicity isn't a bad thing.

Judges remain wary that it would be too easy for users to print illegal copies of the books using Google's service. Google re-affirms that the indexes would be limited to a certain number of pages and difficult to print.

You can read a nice, long article on it at Wired News.
ANOTHER NEWS ARTICLE: HERE. This article presents more information on both sides of the lawsuit dispute: 8,000 angry authors vs. Google's billion-dollar corporation.

Now for my commentary:

Do you even have a concept on how much information all the books in the world's libraries CONTAIN? LOTS. In fact, more than Google is probably indexing right now... it may just not be as current.

Google's small print at the bottom of their homepage, which currently reads: "Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages". This text could change to "pages" and go up to almost 100,000,000,000 pages if it indexed all of the worlds' books pages. That is a LOT of information! Google would THRIVE on it. But... legal issues could throw the project back into the water...