[heimatau]

I think it's important to mention that Google only returns 'snippets' of the text. The entire book is searchable and indexed but Google book-scanning project prevents use to read the entire book. The court ruled this is fair use since it enables the searcher to find out if the searched book has substantial information regarding their research/searching.

[joering2]

One could wonder if the same rule would apply to music.

Would it be okay to have 30 seconds of any song available free online, just so that you could search for a lyrics of the song you heard on the radio, and then match it with 30 sec audio clip to find out whether the song is the one you were looking for.

[heimatau]

30 second clips (which would be about 14% of most songs) wouldn't be the equivalent. Since google is only providing less than a handful of pages in a ~300 page book (1%).

[TillE]

The practical use cases / academic value of such a thing would be far lower.