(Consumerist.com) – After more than a decade of legal back-and-forth, the issue of whether or not Google Books — which allows users to search the texts of millions of scanned books — violates copyright law has been settled (for now), as the U.S. Supreme Court today refused to hear an appeal from the nation’s largest trade group for professional writers.
This lawsuit goes back to the original Google Library project, which launched in 2004 as a series of partnerships between the search engine behemoth and several of the nation’s top research libraries. These institutions select books from their collections for Google to scan and make searchable — without permission from the authors involved.
While Google Library has resulted in the scanning of more than 20 million titles, many of these books are either out of print or in the public domain.
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