A library participating in the project rose to Google Print’s def...

those concerned about copyright infringement “cannot lose sight of the tremendous benefits this project will bring for society.” Predicting research and learning largely will move to the digital world, Hilton added: “Material that does not exist in digital form will effectively disappear.” It’s up to libraries to archive the world’s written works, and Google is a partner in that, he said. Fair-use advocates continued to pile on to critics of the project. Creative Commons Chmn. Lawrence Lessig said the suit’s roots date back a century, when farmers sued the then-new airline industry for flying over their land without permission. “Google Print could be the most important contribution to the spread of knowledge since Jefferson dreamed of national libraries,” said Lessig, a law prof. at project participant Stanford U.: “Given the total mess of copyright records, there is absolutely no way to enable this sort of access to our past while asking permission of authors up front… Even if Google could afford that cost, no one else could.” Google could win the suit by arguing the “individualized snippets” in search results are “a fair use because it greatly reduces overall transaction costs in the society,” James DeLong, Progress & Freedom Foundation senior fellow, said. Some writers spoke out. Sci-fi writer and blogger Roger Simon said Google doesn’t make it easy to opt out: “I don’t know whether they plan on scanning any of my books, but they certainly haven’t contacted me -- nor have they, to my knowledge, contacted any other writers… Most of us wouldn’t even know how to contact them.” He continued: “Yahoo, Microsoft and Google act these days almost as transnational online super states with no one to restrict them.”