"If Google could find a way to take that corpus, sliced and diced by genre, topic, time period, all the ways you can divide it, and make that available to machine-learning researchers and hobbyists at universities and out in the wild, I’ll bet there’s some really interesting work that could come out of that. Nobody knows what,” Sloan says. He assumes Google is already doing this internally. Jaskiewicz and others at Google would not say."

For books that are scanned, but with no extra licensing, would Google be allowed to do anything with the data? Create a very delocalized n-gram set? Use it as the "test" set (not even cross-validation, where it might influence hyperparams) for a ML algorithm?

Edit: would love to know where google's authorization derives from, with the ngram set. Somewhere in the Judge's orders? A negotiated fee with the Authors Guild?