Google announces $125 million copyright deal

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Agreement will see millions more books available online through Google Book Search (Getty Images)

Google has announced a new settlement agreement worth $125 million with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers (AAP) that will see millions more books and other copyrighted material being made available online.

The new accord will ensure rights and interests of copyright owners who decide to distribute their content through Google Book Search, an initiative that enables the full text searching of more than a million books online.

More than 20,000 publishers and 29 libraries around the world currently market their books through the service.

The agreement was reached after two years of negotiations sparked by a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild. A separate lawsuit was also filed by five major publishers as representatives of the AAP including McGraw-Hill and Penguin Group.

Together they challenged Google’s plans to digitize, search and show previews of copyrighted books, and to share digital copies with libraries without the copyright owners’ permission.

Subject to approval by a federal judge, the settlement sees Google paying $125 million to establish the Book Rights Registry that will resolve existing claims by authors and publishers, and to cover legal fees.

“Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor,” said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google.

“While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips,” he added.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Publishers will benefit from it...
Posted by Ori on Thursday 30 October 2008 at 15:53 UAE time

I remember that a few years ago, people were saying that video conference over the Internet will kill the airline industry. What happened is that as people had better ways to connect over the Internet, they had more reasons to fly and meet other people. I think that a better search in books, will actually create more demand for books.

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