The Tragedy of Google Books: Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

I followed this story a bit as it happened. This seems like a good retrospective summary. It is a tragedy that we can't have access to at least some of those books. What's needed is a major change in international copyright law, but that would be a very difficult thing to achieve while legislators have almost no interest in the matter, other than occasionally extending copyright when asked to do so by Disney and co.

Obviously you can't change international copyright law by means of a civil action between a US-based "ad slinger" (as theregister.co.uk calls it) and some private writers' association.

I personally wouldn't call it a tragedy. No way google did this to "serve humanity", they see a way to make money on this. 10-20 years down this road, and the only way to access this knownledge would be to subscribe to some service.