Google Book project gets reprieve in Germany

German publisher WBG has dropped its legal challenge to Google's Books Library Project, according to the Internet search giant.

"It's our belief that the display of short snippets from in-copyright books does not infringe German copyright law," Google general counsel David Drummond wrote in a posting on the Official Google Blog on Wednesday.

"Today the court indicated that it agreed, drawing a comparison with the snippets used in Google Web search. And the court also rejected the WBG's argument that the scanning of its books in the U.S. infringed German copyright law," he wrote.

While Germany has backed down, the French are forging ahead. Publishing group Le Martiniere is suing Google for "counterfeiting and breach of intellectual property rights" over the controversial book scanning and digitization project, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported earlier this month.

France's National Publishers' Union (SNE), which represents 400 publishers, has threatened legal action against Google over the project and publishers in the United Kingdom also have criticized Google over the plan.

In the United States, the Google project faces two copyright-related lawsuits from author and publisher groups, who claim that scanning copyright protected books and making them searchable online violates their copyright. Google argues that copyright is protected because it is only showing snippets of the work, unless the book is in the public domain.