Another Viewpoint
While the act of displaying snippets may be within fair use, Google still has in its personal possession complete copies of copyrighted books on its hard drives, which it created without the prior permission of the copyright holders. That is a copyright violation in and of itself.
However useful Google Books may be in encouraging sales of the books in question, it is also clearly in the interests of authors to establish that copyright law says what it means, and means what it says, and "No part of this book may be reproduced in any medium whatsoever, or stored in a digital retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder" means exactly that (less the statutory fair use exemption, of course).
If nobody at Google goes to jail over this, somebody else is going to try.
It's true that it would be a shame to have the effort put into digitizing those books wasted - perhaps the data could be maintained by the government in a secure facility until such time as their copyrights expire. Or perhaps it would be enough if Google had to pay the salary of government officials who watched over their data trove to make sure that it was only accessed for snippet searches, and no one at Google was sneaking in to read those copies of copyrighted books.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
