Google’s plan to digitize every bound book in some of the nation's largest libraries and make them available online has cleared what could have been a major legal hurdle. The tech juggernaut announced Tuesday that it has settled a lawsuit filed by five publishing companies over Google's right to use copyrighted material without prior permission.

Introduced in December 2004, Google Book Search scans images of books from the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University and the New York Public Library, among others, and stores them online for users to access from anywhere in the world.

In Tuesday’s settlement, which is still pending court approval, Google agreed to pay $125 million to launch a Book Rights Registry and compensate publishers and authors who argued that Google's program violated copyright law.

University Librarian Paul Courant said the University Library will now be able to continue digitizing its collection in collaboration with Google without fear of future legal intervention.

“What this settlement means is that they can continue without worry to scan all of the remaining works,” he said. “And we can continue without worry to receive copies that we’ll be able to use to help manage our collections, and to do research of a kind that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.”

Courant said just under half of the University’s collection has been scanned. He said it would take some time before the rest of those books, especially those still protested by copyright, will be accessible online.

“If it’s an in-copyright work in this settlement, my guess is we are at the very best, a year and a half away, and it could be twice that,” he said.

After the scanning process is completed, Courant said, the University community will have access to some of the world's largest book collections.

The $125 million from Tuesday’s settlement will go toward the creation of a program called the Book Rights Registry, which will pay authors and publishers royalties from advertisement revenue earned when their works are accessed online. It will also be used to pay certain copyright holders whose works have already been scanned without their approval, and to cover the legal costs of the plaintiffs.

According to Courant, the University will not pay any of Google's settlement costs.

The settlement, Courant said, allows Google and the participating Universities and other institutions to digitize their collections without negotiating individual contracts with publishers and authors, saving money and time.

“What would have happened otherwise, we would have had to negotiate book by book, publisher by publisher, for the rights to be able to make the book available to somebody,” he said. “Presumably, there also would have been some payment there too, but the negotiation costs would have been huge.”

Allan Adler, the vice president for legal and governmental affairs for the Association of American Publishers, said the Google Book Search project will now be able to develop and expand its offerings to readers on a legal footing.”

But it remains unclear how much access different types of Google users will have.

Courant said the University will pay for a license that provides access to all of the content scanned from all of the libraries. He said the University will be rewarded for participating in the project through some reduced access fees for the materials from other libraries.

“The universities that made the biggest contributions of books will get credit against that fee for the contributions they made,” he said.