Google copyright settlement OKd

Google Inc. won preliminary approval of a settlement of copyright lawsuits by publishers and authors in which it will pay $125 million to resolve claims over the company’s book-scanning project.

U.S. District Judge John Sprizzo in New York issued the order tentatively approving the deal and scheduled a hearing for June 11, when he will further consider the pact’s fairness. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has said the settlement, announced Oct. 28, will enable it to make millions of books searchable and printable online.

Google was sued in 2005 by the Author’s Guild, Pearson’s Penguin unit, McGraw-Hill Cos., John Wiley & Sons Inc. and CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster subsidiary. They claimed that the digitizing process infringed their copyrights on a massive scale.