For instance, it can reasonably argue that its book-scanning project in effect creates a better card catalogue that helps publishers and authors.

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Some security researchers even believe that the CAPTCHA-breaking software was using Tesseract--an open source image recognition software sponsored by Google itself and used in its book-scanning projects--to recognize the distorted characters.

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The book publishers claimed that scanning books was an act of reproduction and, as such, was something that should be paid for.

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It designed optical scanning software that can tell when a book page is creased and correct it on the fly.

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Source code can also be distributed in text-based form like a PDF or scanable book which is what MIT did for Phil Zimmermann and later what 70 international volunteers did for the PGPi Scanning Project in 1997.

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