Matthew Ingram | Globe & Mail Blogs | Oct 28, 2008
After almost three years of legal battles, Google has settled a dispute with U.S. publishers and authors over its ambitious book-scanning project. The project has been under a cloud since 2005, when the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild filed two class-action lawsuits against the Web company, alleging that scanning books without permission amounted to large-scale copyright infringement.
During the dispute, Google and a number of copyright experts argued that providing small snippets of scanned books to users should be covered under the ‘fair use’ clause in U.S. copyright law, but the author and publisher groups said simply copying their works at all — even out-of-print books — was illegal, regardless of how small the snippets were that Google provided to readers. The company promised to remove books from its index on request, but authors and publishers said that this reverse-onus approach was unfair.
More from Google – How it will all work:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/index.html#2