Great news for fair use doctrine, and a big win for word geeks.

Judge Denny Chin said much in his ruling granting Google’s motion for summary judgment, but this part stuck out to me:

Google Books permits humanities scholars to analyze massive amounts of data — the literary record created by a collection of tens of millions of books. Researchers can examine word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers to consider how literary style has changed over time.

The decision is up on Scribd. I shall geek out further about it after I have a chance to read it through.