Google recently reached an agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) under which the firm will pay $125 million to resolve outstanding legal actions against it in relation to its Google Book search service, which offers full-text searching facilities to users.

The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, is subject to approval by the US District Court in New York, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP’s membership.

These lawsuits challenged Google’s plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.

The money will be used to establish the Book Rights Registry, to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees. Holders worldwide of US copyrights can register their works with the Book Rights Registry and receive compensation from institutional subscriptions, book sales, ad revenues and other possible revenue models, as well as a cash payment if their works have already been digitized.

Google says that the agreement would:

• Provide more access to out-of-print books by generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the US to search these works and preview them online; 
• Further expand the electronic market for copyrighted books in the US, by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books; and 
• Provide free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in US public and university libraries.

The President of the Author’s Guild commented “Its hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it. As a reader and researcher, I’ll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world’s great libraries. As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work. This deal makes good sense.”