Google Books Agreement Blocked By Court

Google’s agreement with publishers to make millions of books available online via their eBooks platform has been blocked by a US court.

The web giant has already scanned around 15million books onto their databse, and had agreed a deal to make them available for users, and then to pay around £76.9m per year in royalties to the copyright owners of the scanned books.

However the New York court ruled against this agreement saying that many of the copyright owners of the books would be unable to be found and therefore millions of pound of royalties would remain unclaimed, giving Google an unfair advantage over competitors as they would make excessive amounts of profit.

Google have responded by saying they are disappointed that the deal has been blocked, however insist they will continue looking in to a way to make millions of books digitally available – and being Google, kings of search, SEO and everything internet, its hard to see them not figuring out a way.