Quote:
Originally Posted by gweeks
Right up until the Authors Guild sued them. The first settlement agreement would have given Google rights to sell anything they wanted to after scanning it. That over broad settlement was rightly thrown out by the judge.
Greg
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Regardless of what any agreement may have been
interpreted as giving them (Google) the right to do, no one with any sense believed that Google was ever intending to sell copyrighted works that they didn't hold the rights to sell. The AG was being paranoid. I suppose it's a good thing that a judge clarified things later, but the AG's lawsuit was always a tempest in a teapot. Google was creating a archive/search project and the AG panicked over perceived infringement. The ultimate takeaway from any lawsuit, in my opinion, was that it was deemed that Google wasn't violating copyright with their scanning project. Anyone who believes Google was ever intending to "stock" an ebook store with what would have amounted to stolen books isn't thinking very clearly.