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this isn't evil. there's a very real chance that google will lose the suit if they take it all the way, so settling at least buys them the ability to go forward with their book indexing project and protects them from a potentially very large legal liability. it's not like google set out to strike an exclusive-right-to-copy deal.

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Also it's worth mentioning that the plaintiffs are fearful of ending up with a bad precedent for their side, so they often settle on good terms for Google...

I don't understand why this is any different than web search, which has repeatedly won in court. Can someone explain it to me?

I think part of the difference is that robots.txt was established early enough to become a de facto standard way to opt out of automated indexing. There is no equivalent system for print, where the convention is that everything is fully protected by copyright by default.

Another difference is that automated indexing has become inherent to web publishing, so much that people publish with the expection that Google will index their pages. Book authors, on the other hand, publish with the expectation that their works are not indexed in this fashion.

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