IDG News Service - The Authors Guild has sued five universities and a library partnership organization alleging copyright infringement over their use of certain digitized copies of books made by Google in its Books Library Project.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday, goes after the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, Cornell University and the HathiTrust. Joining the Authors Guild as plaintiffs are the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ) and eight individual authors.
The HathiTrust was founded in 2008 by several major universities as a partnership of their research institutions and libraries to establish a repository to archive and share their digitized library collections. It contains copyright and public domain books scanned by the universities, Google, the Internet Archive and Microsoft.
However, the lawsuit focuses specifically on copyright works scanned by Google that are in "orphan" status, meaning that the copyright owners for different reasons can't be located and contacted.
Specifically, the Authors Guild objects to a plan unveiled in June by the HathiTrust and the University of Michigan to provide full-text access to digitized orphan works to University of Michigan users and visitors to its campus libraries. Access will only be available to works the university's library has in print format in its collection. Other universities including Cornell and Duke plan to join the effort with similar projects to make orphan works available to their library patrons.
Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, said in a statement that the universities' orphan works project is "an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights."
The Authors Guild and the other plaintiffs are asking the court to declare that the universities are violating copyright law not only through the orphan works project but overall through the digitization and distribution of every book without the authorization of the copyright owner.
The plaintiffs also want the court to issue an injunction forbidding the defendants from "systematically reproducing, distributing and/or displaying Plaintiff's or any other copyrighted works without authorization." They also want the court to forbid the universities from providing copyright books to Google for scanning if copyright owners haven't authorized it. The court should also impound all digital copies of books that have been scanned without the permission of the copyright owners, according to the plaintiffs.
Paul Courant [cq], dean of libraries at the University of Michigan, said that the school's attorneys will respond to the lawsuit after they've had a chance to analyze the complaint, but that the university is confident that its use of digitized books is lawful and that it provides a lot of scholarly value to the university community.
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