New York — With the planned settlement between Google’s 7-year-old book digitization project and publishers still lingering, a legal battle by proxy has now landed five universities in court for allegedly infringing copyright by accepting scans of 7 million books from Google. The Authors Guild and writers from Australia, Britain and Canada on Monday asked a federal judge to “confiscate” scans of all books that are currently held by HathiTrust, a joint digital book-storage project of the University of Michigan, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University and Cornell University.
The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that the universities obtained unauthorized scans from Internet giant Google of an estimated seven million copyright-protected books “by digitizing, archiving, copying and now publishing the copyrighted works without the authorization of those works’ rights holders, the universities are engaging in one of the largest copyright infringements in history.”
In the ongoing book digitization project, the search engine giant collaborated with many libraries at US universities in order to obtain admission to the works it wants to digitize. Now, several groups that represent book authors have filed suit against those universities, attempting to block both digital lending and an orphaned works project.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors and the Québec Union of Writers. Individual authors include Pat Cummings, Roxana Robinson and T. J. Stiles.
“We have been greatly concerned about the seven million copyright-protected books that HathiTrust has on its servers for a while,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of Authors Guild, an industry group that says it represents more than 8,500 authors. “Those scans are unauthorized by the authors.” HathiTrust is the name of the partnership of libraries.
The lawsuit comes several months after Michigan said it aims to begin permitting students and faculty to download specific “orphan works” or books whose copyright owners cannot be found. The university had said it intended to permit downloads of 27 orphan works next month and 140 more in November.
Authors Guild president Scott Turow said in a statement that the plan to allow these downloads is only one reason why the organization opposes the universities’ scans.
“These books, because of the universities’ and Google’s unlawful actions, are now at needless, intolerable digital risk,” Turow stated. “Even if it were not for this preposterous, ad-hoc initiative, we would have a major problem with the digital repository. Authors should not have to trust their works to a group that is making up the rules as it goes along.”
“This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights,” Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, said in a joint statement with the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs.
“This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection,” Loukakis said. “These are not orphaned books, they are abducted books.”
The lawsuit is the latest to grow out of Google’s book digitization project, which involved scanning copies of books from various libraries and making the books searchable. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers opposed the project and sued Google for copyright infringement back in 2005, arguing that it did not have the right to make digital copies of the books. The suit demands to block two separate efforts.
Other parties to the complaint are the Quebec Writers Union, children’s book author Pat Cummings, novelists Loukakis, Roxana Robinson, Daniele Simpson and Fay Weldon, poet Andre Roy, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer T.J. Stiles.
The universities named in the lawsuit are the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University.
Interestingly, the New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann, who has been pursuing the Google Books litigation closely, states that the lawsuit raises at least two questions. The first deals with the legality of the mass digitization project, while the second concerns the libraries’ plans for identifying and distributing orphan works.
“This lawsuit mushes those questions together,” Grimmelmann says. “It’s an open question whether this lawsuit will ultimately be about one, the other, both or neither.”
A hearing in the case is to be held in New York on Thursday.