Friday, 20 November 2009

GOOGLE WINS PRELIMINARY HEARING

GOOGLE INC owner of the most popular Internet search engine, and a group of authors and publishers won preliminary approval of a revised settlement over the company’s plans to make millions of books available online.

A U.S. District Judge, in a ruling filed yesterday in New York, granted preliminary approval of the settlement agreement and scheduled a hearing for final approval on Feb. 18. The authors and publishers revised an earlier settlement to limit the Internet company to books published in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada. Several nations including France and Germany objected to the reach of the earlier deal, which would have covered millions of out-of-print books published around the world.

Under the $125 million agreement, Google will set up a Book Rights Registry with publishers and authors to compensate copyright holders whose works are scanned. It also would seek to identify and compensate the rights holders of so-called orphan works whose owners aren’t currently known.

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