More Copyright Controversy with Google Books

I'm somewhat surprised that I've not heard more librarians complaining about this. I had not really considered all the ramifications about it. Philipp Lenson on Google Blogoscoped posts about Freeing Google Books. Basically, he notes that Google scans public domain books available from libraries and then appears to add further restrictions for those books including restricting commercial republication and the removal of the "digitized by Google" mark. Since that bothered him, he has pulled 100 titles from Google Books and "set them free" on his own Authorama Public Domain Books site (with the "digitized by Google" mark removed).

Danny has more about the issue in his post at SearchEngineLand. He also notes a problem with searching Google Books and finding which records have a full PDF:

Unfortunately, getting back results in this way doesn't make it immediately clear which books can be downloaded or not. For example, here's search on the word cars. I did the search to match "Full view books" as instructed. After that, the only way to know if any of these are downloadable is to click on each individual book and check. That's a pain.

In addition, Danny received a response from Google which notes that

The front matter of our PDF books is not a EULA [end user license agreement]. We make some requests, but we are not trying to legally bind users to those requests.