Google Settles Lawsuit
From Bloomberg:
Google Inc. will pay $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits by publishers and authors over its book-scanning project, a “historic” deal that the company said will make millions of books searchable and printable online.
The owner of the most popular Internet search engine said the agreement will expand the Google Book program to let online readers search for and buy copyrighted and out-of-print books in whole or page-by-page, and provide U.S. libraries with free access to the database.
”The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips,” Google co- founder Sergey Brin said today in a statement, calling the accord “historic.”
The Author’s Guild and members of the Association of American Publishers sued Google in 2005, claiming the book program’s digitizing process infringed copyrights on a massive scale. The project, which began in 2004, includes Harvard University, the New York Public Library and about 10,000 publishers in an effort to make books searchable online.
Today’s deal, which must be approved by a judge in Manhattan federal court, ends the lawsuits and expands what users find online when they search for a book. Searches in the Google Book program currently generate about three or four lines of text from a work. The settlement will expand the results to several pages and let readers buy full access to the content, the parties said.
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