Google has signed an agreement with the Association of American Publishers (AAP), ending its seven-year legal wrangling over the scanning of books.
The publishers involved in the settlement include McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, the Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster.
As per the settlement, publishers will have the option to allow Google to display portions or the entire book content, or to sell the work through Google Play and the books scanned by the search engine in its Library Project can now be included by publishers.
To date, Google has scanned about 20 million books, and the settlement will allow to scan millions more books online in different forms.
The settlement does not cover Google’s current litigation with the Authors Guild.
Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken in response to the AAP deal said that the publishers’ private settlement, whatever its terms, does not resolve the authors’ copyright infringement claims against Google.
"Google continues to profit from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to authors’ rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of US authors continues," Aiken said.
In March last year, a US judge rejected Google’s $125m settlement with publishers and authors to let it publish millions of books online.
Earlier in September this year, the US Court of Appeals in Manhattan had granted stay on Authors Guild of America’s copyright lawsuit over Google’s plans to digitally scan millions of books.
In June 2102, Google had signed an agreement with two French organisations representing authors and book publishers, capping its six-year legal dispute over the scanning of books.
