I read this to say that Piracy is legal if you don't charge for it. There is no difference between putting a full book on line and a full movie. This won't stand for long, MPAA wouldn't have lost this case. Authors are just not as well organized.
"I read this to say that Piracy is legal if you don't charge for it."
This statement is not accurate. See my prior post about the four factor test for Fair Use. The judge ruled that this specific use (which doesn't distribute full books online) was fair use. Putting a movie online would almost certainly fail the Fair Use test.
This case is far too complex to be summed up as "Google putting full books online".
I think it's more like "piracy is legal if you do it on a large enough scale".
If some snot-nosed teenager scanned a book and posted it on the web, the court would squash him like an insect. But a multi-billion-dollar company with an army of lawyers at their disposal scans every book and puts them all online, suddenly that's "fair use".
It's like the old saying: if you owe the bank $100 you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $100 million, the bank has a problem.
