Copyright Laws and Google

First of all, there's no doubt in my mind that the United States' system of using copyright laws to protect intellectual property is simply outdated in the age of the Internet. Never before has information flowed so incredibly fast that an entire book can be transferred as a .pdf in less than a minute. Google's controversial book project seeks to allow users to search for a string of text contained within the contents of an entire book, and allow limited viewing of the piece if the work is still contained in the private domain. The controversy lies in Google's inclusion of snippets of copyrighted work, presented in a user's relevant search results. Google claims that the inclusion of these snippets falls under the legal category of "fair use", implying that the work is scholarly in nature and therefore permission is not needed from the respective authors. As far as this is concerned, I agree with Google. As long as Google Inc. is not making ad revenue based on generating traffic via copyrighted snippets, it indeed should be deemed a scholarly project and not subject to scrutiny. Certainly, this will not be enough for some authors (and most publishers), as they will seek to squeeze every bit of profit out of their projects. The delegation of authors and publishers is facing an uphill battle; the inevitable reality of technology increasing to the point where intellectual property laws are no longer relevant is a very real one. If Google gives up on its project (unlikely given the large amount of capital invested so far), there will no doubt be another party willing to host the material. Google needs to find a way to please all of the parties involved, without resorting to settling in court over every single instance. One way could be to utilize Google's advertisement system, giving the publishers a percentage of the revenue derived from specific copyrighted pieces.