Coming to you (almost live) from today's UC Berkeley School of Information conference on "The Google Books Settlement and the Future of Information Access."

The thing that few people realize about the Google Books Settlement is that it never actually resolved the complaint that started the class action lawsuit.

To recap, when Google started scanning in jillions of books from university libraries, it also started indexing them and posting snippets online, as part of its quest to make the world's information as accessible as possible. So, for example, if you searched for "whaling", your results might have included a snippet of Moby Dick and a citation as to which book it came from.

Authors and publishers objected, citing copyright violation. Google claimed fair use. Authors and publishers didn't agree, so they sued.

Once everyone got to the table, they realized they could keep fighting over the fair use question, or they could try to design a system in which Google could, in fact, use content from the scanned books, and rights holders would be appropriately compensated. The outcome of those negotiations is the settlement, which is pending approval by a New York district judge in October.

At today's conference, which examined myriad aspects of the settlement, Louis Trager, a reporter for Warren Communications News' Washington Internet Daily, asked the million-dollar question:

When you look at this in relation to peer-to-peer [file sharing], what is the lesson for the kids about who does and doesn't get away with the "copy first and answer questions later" policy?

The panelists, including Google Books engineering director Dan Clancy and Pamela Samuelson, the co-director the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and a vocal critic of the Google Books Settlement, shifted in their seats and moved on to the next question.