Georgia Harper, responsible for IP issues at the University of Texas, has written a wonderful series of blog posts as a draft of a paper introducing core IP, copyright, and fair use concepts, as well as court and legislative propensitiies relating to mass digitization. Recommended.

The following paragraph, particularly, caught my eye:

 Unlike many, I am optimistic about Google's chances of winning the lawsuits, all the way to the Supreme Court. I have written about this before (Harper, 2006), and the recent iParadigms decision further reinforces my optimism, but as I have also said on many occasions, I think they are likely to settle. Most litigants do. And while it's very difficult for all of us, not knowing what will happen to fair use and whether the gamble will have been worth it, or what the shape of a settlement might be, we can already see without any doubt that Book Search is changing the publishing world. Google is, behind the scenes, patiently persuading copyright owners that more open wins over less open, that there are tremendous audiences for not only their current works, but for their out of print works and works long forgotten. Google has succeeded in signing up every major U.S. publisher (Random House was the last to come on board) as a partner in Book Search and I think the reason is not that complicated: Google aggregates a monstrous amount of demand around what is building up to be an equally monstrous amount of supply. This is good. It is good for readers. It is good for writers. It is good for publishers, at least for now. And it is good for Google. It pushes libraries over a cliff, but, hey, we need a good push actually.