A few years ago Google began an ambitious program to scan the books of major academic and research libraries and put the digital copies online. When they were working with public domain material this was not a problem. But then Google began scanning books that were in copyright. This brought about a lawsuit from the Association of American Publishers and the Author’s Guild.
This suit has been wending its way through the courts for quite some time now, but a settlement was finally reached at the end of November.
Library Journal has a great round up of the responses, from Harvard to Siva Vaidhyanathan to Lawrence Lessig and Brewster Kahle among others.
It’s a complicated case, but this is a great starting point if your interested in how this all shakes out.
