Google Books: 1, Authors: 0 in Landmark Ruling

The eight-year-long legal battle over Google Books has finally come to a close. A judge ruled on Thursday that the search giant's scanning of millions of books falls under fair use and doesn't infringe the copyrights of the books' authors. The ruling (.PDF), issued by U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in New York, ends the legal scuffle among the publishing trade group The Authors Guild, several individual authors and Google, as first reported by GigaOM. Google began scanning books in 2004 with the goal of publishing snippets in search results.