[...] The company's lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: "Google's leadership doesn't care terribly much about precedent or law." In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions.
I think he's right to fear the idea of Google being the only entity with access to this information, but wrong to think that further closing it off is the right solution (we gotta open it up to EVERYONE buddy)