Last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt has written an article for the print Wall Street Journal defending its program "Google Print Library Project" , which has prompted two lawsuits so far.

The letter came as a reply to some members of the publishing industry who believe this program violates copyright law and trying to stop it.

“Google Print's job is to make it easier for people to find books.” Eric Schmidt said, “When you do a Google search, your results now include pointers to those books whose contents, stored in the Google Print index, con

tain your search terms. For many books, these results will, like an ordinary card catalog, contain basic bibliographic information and, at most, a few lines of text where your search terms appear.”

Google says it will scan copyright protected books from libraries unless the publisher or copyright holder expressly opts out. If the book is copyright protected, there is minimal text, only a few sentences, or "snippets," surrounding the keywords searched. There are no ads on Google Library Project pages.

You can read the full letter here. (Subscription might be required)