Google Ends Legal Dispute With French Authors Over Scans

From Bloomberg:

Google, owner of the world’s largest search engine, ended legal disputes with a French publishing trade group and a French authors’ association over the U.S. company’s scanning of books.

The Syndicat National de l’Edition, which represents more than 600 publishers, and the SGDL Society of Authors agreed with Google to end litigation over Google’s scanning of copyright- protected books without permission, according to two statements today. This means Google no longer faces French legal action over book scanning, according to Bill Echikson, a spokesman for the Mountain View, California-based company.
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“We’ve agreed a model to get out-of-print books back into print,” Echikson said in a telephone interview of the agreement with SNE. While Google’s settlement with the publishers’ group doesn’t contain any financial terms, it will separately sponsor a school-reading program it runs, he said.
Google plans to sell some of the scanned copyrighted works as electronic books and will share the proceeds with publishers under individual deals where the “majority of the revenue comes to the publisher,” said Philippe Colombet, Google Books’ strategic partner development manager in France.

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Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Preservation, Interviews, Profiles, Publishing