The legal fight began in 2005, when the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed separate class-action lawsuits objecting to Google's practice of digitizing library books without always getting permission from copyright owners.

The lawsuits alleged massive copyright infringement on Google's part by scanning, storing and indexing these copyright books without authorization and making their full text searchable on the Google Books search engine.

Google argued in its defense that its practice was protected under the fair use principle because for the books in question, it only displayed brief text snippets of their content.

That litigation dragged on until October 2008 when Google and the plaintiffs surprisingly reached an agreement to settle the matter and hammered out an extremely complex proposal that soon became the target of both praise and criticism.

That settlement proposal called for Google to pay US$125 million and in exchange obtain from the plaintiffs rights to display longer portions of in-copyright books.