A coalition of authors' groups is suing American universities for copyright infringement on scanned works.
September 13, 2011- The Authors Guild and other authors’ groups filed a lawsuit to stop the creation of online libraries from the millions of books that have been scanned.
On Monday, eight authors were joined by the Australian Society of Authors and the Authors Guild in filing the copyright infringement suit in Manhattan, New York.
In their suit, they state they received from Google more than seven million unauthorized scans of copyright-protected work.
They say universities in New York, Indiana, Wisconsin and California pooled the files that were unauthorized into a site put together by the University of Michigan.
The immediate response from the University of Michigan’s dean of libraries was, “the lawsuit surprises us and we are confident what we have done is legal.”
The repository created by the university is known as HathiTrust enables an unlimited amount of downloads that are available to faculty and students of what are referred to as orphan works. These are books where the writers could not be found and the books were no long in print.
The authors sought to block the release on October 13 of more than 27 works by American, Russian and French authors to more than 250,000 faculty and students as well as the November scheduled release of another 140 works that included books in French, Russian, Spanish and Yiddish.
