Update in a legal battle that’s been going on for 8 years.

A long-running copyright lawsuit between the Authors’ Guild and Google over its book-scanning project is over, and Google has won on the grounds that its scanning is “fair use.”

In other words, the snippets of books that Google shows for free don’t break copyright, and Google doesn’t need the authors’ permission to engage in the scanning and display of short bits of books.

—Ars Technica.