CNet's Stephen Shankland explains:

A federal judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit that an author group brought against Google, concluding that books are like Web pages when it comes to indexing them and displaying small excerpts in search results.

The Google Books project has indexed millions of books, digitizing them without copyright holders' permission, and the Authors Guild sued over the fact. But U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in New York rejected that argument, granting on Thursday Google's motion for summary judgment.

In his opinion, Judge Chin cited Google Book Search's "significant public benefits," saying that the project is good for the "arts and sciences" while still being careful to avoid piracy.

I've heard passionate arguments on both sides of the issue. Authors are obviously rankled that Google did this without their permission, and they're concerned about piracy issues. But there are also obviously tremendous benefits to having books digitized and available for search. In an ideal world, the government would be doing this digitization project, making an online public library available to all. But Google got there first, and so this battle has dragged on for years.