A copyright lawyer weighs in on Amazon's search-in-the-book feature. Apparently, he 'likes it', but is also makes him 'uneasy'. The rest of the commentary is a fairly predictable trawl thru copyright law; he gets happy noting that Amazon's made it tougher to 'read an entire book online'.

I don't think he really understands the power of this value proposition - it's not about 'driving sales' - it's more about locking in a user base and raising switching costs by providing massive search economies. It's about radically shifting the value equation for Amazon users - not just selling them incrementally more books.

Note to copyright lawyers: do something cool and fix copyright - instead of whinging about how copyright violations make you 'uneasy'. Copyright violations are now the rule rather than the exception in digital markets - how about some innovation?