You have to love the stupidity of MacMillan exec Richard Charkin, who seems to think that copying books for search purposes is the same thing as stealing a laptop:

It's no secret that a number of publishers have been up in arms about Google's approach to digitizing their works, but Richard Charkin went so far as to recruit a colleague and swipe a pair of laptops from a Google Books kiosk at the event. About an hour later, the booth attendants actually noticed the missing goods and presumably began to panic, and the haughty executive then had the nerve to return the machines to their rightful owners whilst dropping the "hope you enjoyed a taste of your own medicine" line. He justified the bizarre behavior by suggesting that "there wasn't a sign by the computers informing him not to steal them," apparently referencing Google's controversial tactics when scanning books.

I don't recall Google copying books and then handing them out or reselling them - I guess that was too advanced a point for Charkin to grasp.

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