>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.” This "cutoff" language is part of what makes the Author's Guild argument fall down. The authors still get all the normal licensing rights as before, so the argument appears wrong…
Basically, they are saying that if anyone makes a profit off their work, they deserve a cut of it. Makes sense on the surface of it, but let's try applying this to other categories. Take for example a food critic. He makes his living from reviewing the creative output of various chefs. Without the chefs doing what they do, the critic wouldn't have an audience and therefore no newspaper column. So do the chefs deserve a cut of the critic's revenue? Of course a favorable review does tend to drive extra traffic to the restaurant, just as a positive match in Google Books can drive a sale to a given book.