The Information Professional

"Hellzapoppin' in the world of intellectual property rights these days.

In 2002, Google began scanning the world's 130 million or so books in preparation for the "secret 'books' project" that eventually became Google Books. In 2004, they began offering access to these scans, displaying the irritatingly-named "snippets" of books in their search results. And in no time at all, they were getting sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers for copyright infringement.

These lawsuits, plus two more that were filed subsequently against Google, resulted in a six-year rollercoaster ride that, like all good roller coasters, exhilarated, terrified and rattled all the participants, and ended by thumping their quaking bods to a halt, last March, in very nearly the same place from which they'd started out.

But during that time the world had changed, and an altogether new way of bringing printed books into the digital commons had emerged.

Enter the nonprofit alternative for bringing the world's books online for all readers: the newly-funded Digital Public Library of America."