Freedom of Speech

After seven years of litigation, Google reaches an agreement with publishers over scanning books which allows publishers to pull their books from Google's electronic library. This is a victory for copyright censorship. The whole point of copyright is to limit people's access to information. In what world is that a good thing? In practice it makes authors dependent of government for excessive profits they could not make in a free market, tending to make them more supportive of government in general and government interventions in the marketplace specifically. Copyright ends up empowering giant publishing corporations who are bed with the government and who restrict what books get published for readers. Nothing about this is good for the people.