That all makes sense to me, and I use Google Books a lot, whatever my misgivings about Google in general (and I have many). But what I still find hard to stoma

That all makes sense to me, and I use Google Books a lot, whatever my misgivings about Google in general (and I have many). But what I still find hard to stomach is the notice that the put on page zero of every PDF of books, even those in the public domain: Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying. Doesn’t this read to you like a kind of hostage-taking of this material? What they’re saying is, “We paid a lot of money to digitize this material. Therefore, even though it ‘belongs’ to you, the public, we designate ourselves as simultaneously (a) distinct from the public and (b) non-abusive. So, you can use this thing that ‘belongs’ to you, but you may do so according to our rules. Otherwise we will take it back from you.” Note that they make no statement that in the even that they do discontinue the service, that they would also cease to use the materials for their own internal purposes. To me, these statements together do not amount to testimony that Google believes these documents are “public”. We also ask that you: + Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes. But they can, since they have more money than individuals. They didn’t “design” it for individuals. They decided that it was not for their competitors. It’s a clear statement that they believe they have unique commercial rights in this “free” content. + Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. Whether they actually do that, I don’t know. + Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it. Or? Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAaoHX9KiWY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAaoHX9KiWY + Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can’t offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book’s appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe. And, although we’ve reserved unique rights for ourselves, implicitly excluding you from a wide array of uses of material that “belongs” to you, we also transfer liability in using “your” things to you. But don’t remove our watermark, or else. It’s just so much backstabbing doubletalk.