&gt;In the “friends of the court” brief, it says the law was never intended to “permit a wealthy for-profit entity to digitize millions of works and to cut off authors’ licensing of their reproduction, distribution, and public display rights.”<p>This &quot;cutoff&quot; language is part of what makes the Author&#x27;s Guild argument fall down.  The authors still get all the normal licensing rights as before, so the argument appears wrong on its very face.<p>What the guild is actually trying to say, I think, is that this new use is something Google should have to pay for.  Which is a stronger argument, because it&#x27;s not trivially refuted by the current status.  By overstating their case I think that their point is lost.