At issue is Google's Book Search program, which drew a class-action lawsuit in 2005 when authors and publishers challenged Google's plan to scan hundreds of thousands of books without always securing advance permission from copyright owners. The parties crafted a settlement in October last year that was broadly criticized. The DOJ's concerns about the settlement's compatibility with copyright and antitrust law were the final nail in the coffin of the original draft, and Judge Denny Chin from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York gave Google and the plaintiffs until midnight Friday to submit a revised proposal.

Google listed the following revisions in a statement issued early Saturday:

-- The settlement will only include books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada. Rightsholders in those countries are joining the case as named plaintiffs.

-- The Book Rights Registry that Google and the plaintiffs had agreed to establish will search for rightsholders who have not yet come forward and to hold revenue on their behalf. The settlement now also specifies that a portion of the revenue generated from unclaimed works may, after five years, be used to locate rightsholders, but will no longer be used for the Registry's general operations or redistributed to other rightsholders. The Book Rights Registry is intended to manage a royalty system to compensate authors and publishers from the sale of digitized books.

-- Explicitly written into the settlement is the provision, offered by Google in September, that any book retailer will be able to sell consumers online