from The Economist:
Google has reached a settlement with groups representing authors and publishers, who had sued the world’s biggest internet company in 2005 for copyright infringement. Google has been scanning millions of books into digital form and making the text available online in small “snippets”, to answer users’ search queries. The company said this constituted “fair use” of the copyrighted material, since only a small part of the work was accessible. The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild disagreed. The resulting legal fight was widely expected to end in a settlement, but it took a while to agree on the terms.
Under the deal, Google will pay $125m to compensate copyright holders and will set up a “Book Rights Registry” to pay authors and publishers for the digital use and sale of works—akin to the collection societies that send royalty cheques to musicians and songwriters.
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12523914
