The inclusion of copyrighted works in Google Books was widely criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In the U.S., lawsuits were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption was that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringed copyright laws, even if only snippets were made freely available. Google replied this was "fair use", referring to short excerpts from copyrighted books that could be lawfully quoted in another book or website, as long as the source (author, title, publisher) was mentioned. After three years of conflict, Google reached a settlement with the associations of authors and publishers in October 2008, with an agreement to be signed in 2009. As of December 2008, Google had 24 library partners, including a Swiss one (University Library of Lausanne), a French one (Lyon Municipal Library), a Belgian one (Ghent University Library), a German one (Bavarian State Library), two Spanish ones (National Library of Catalonia and University Complutense of Madrid) and a Japanese one (Keio University Library). The U.S. partner libraries were, by alphabetical order: Columbia University, Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), Cornell University Library, Harvard University, New York Public Library, Oxford University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia and University of Wisconsin-Madison. 2006: TOWARDS A WORLD PUBLIC DIGITAL LIBRARY = [Overview] Conceived by the Internet Archive to offer a universal public digital library, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) was launched in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non profit and governmental organizations willing to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The project took off in 2006, with the digitization of public domain books around the world. Unlike Google Books, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) has made them searchable through any web search engine, and has not scanned copyrighted books, except when the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first contributors to OCA were the University of California, the University of Toronto, the European Archive, the National Archives in United Kingdom, O’Reilly Media and the Prelinger Archives. The digitized collections are freely available in the Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. In December 2008, one million ebooks were posted under OCA principles by the Internet Archive. = [In Depth]