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By Amanda White
Google had to shelve its plans to create the world's largest digital library and bookstore this week, after it ran into a long-running issue in the publishing business- copyright.
The plan of the Internet giant to digitize every book ever published, and make them available, faced a hurdle when a federal judge in New York rejected a $US125 million legal settlement that ad been worked out by the company with representatives of authors and publishers. Google's ambitious plans have bee thrown off following the judgment, and has underscored concerns over its growing power over information.
The effort is a personal project of Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, who is set to become its chief executive in April, and has wide support inside the firm. Larry's publicly known mission is to organize all the information available in the world. "It was very much consistent with Larry's idealism that all of the world's information should be made available freely,," said Ken Auletta, the author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, reports The New York Times.
Judge denny Chin cited concerns of copyright, antitrust along with other, saying that the settlement would have granted Google a "de facto monopoly" and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners. Judge Chin acknowledged that "the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many," but said that the proposed agreement was "not fair, adequate and reasonable." He left open a window that a revised agreement might cross legal barriers.
The ruling will also prove to be a setback for the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which had sued Google in 2005 over its book-scanning project. After two years of prolonged negotiations, the authors, publishers and Google had signed a settlement that would have brought millions of printed books into the digitized form.
15 million books have already been scanned by Google. The entire text of books whose copyright has expired, are available through the Book Search service of Google. Up to 20 per cent of copyrighted titles licensed from publishers are available there, along with only snippets of copyrighted titles for which it has no license.
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