Authors' Group Sues Google Over Library-Scanning Project.

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Author: Young, Jeffrey R.

The Authors Guild and three writers last week filed a class-action lawsuit against Google over the company's partnership with academic libraries to scan books and place portions of them online.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Google's scanning project infringes on the authors' copyrights and will lead to lost profits for authors. Google has said it will scan all the books in at least one of the academic libraries, the one at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, even those that are under copyright. The lawsuit seeks damages and an end to Google's scanning of copyrighted books.

"They're making a plainly commercial use" of authors' works without their consent, said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, in an interview. "The whole purpose of copyright is to allow the authors to share in the commercial value of the works."

Google officials argue that their project is legal because the company will make only short excerpts of copyrighted works available.

"At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries," said Susan Wojcicki, a vice president for product management at Google, in a statement on the company's Web site. "We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world."

Google officials also pointed out their decision to allow copyright holders to opt out of the program by notifying Google of any books that they do not want scanned.

But that aspect of the program upsets the Authors Guild and other groups, including the Association of American Publishers, who say that copyright law requires permission before a work is copied.

"You can't take the shortcut and not get the permission of the copyright holders first," said Mr. Aiken. "What about the next company that comes along and wants to do this?"

Publishing groups have also complained publicly about Google's library project, but the Authors Guild is the first to file a lawsuit challenging the company's practices.

The individual plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Herbert Mitgang, a novelist; Betty Miles, a children's author; and Daniel Hoffman, who was the 1973-74 poet laureate of the United States.

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By Jeffrey R. Young