Google sued for copyright infringement.

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Author: Bodoni, Stéphanie1

Google is facing the wrath of thousands of authors in a class action suit filed against the internet search engine last month over its "unauthorized" digital scanning of books which it plans to make publicly accessible online.

The Authors Guild, the largest US association of some 8,000 published authors and writers, filed the suit together with three individual authors in the Manhattan Federal Court on September 20, accusing Google of "massive copyright infringement" at the expense of individual writers.

At issue is the Google Print library programme, launched last year to create a searchable online register of books in all languages on its website, available to users worldwide.

As part of this project Google last December announced it had reached agreements with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections and make them accessible to online users from anywhere in the world on Google's site. The library will include works as rare as those of the Oxford University's Bodleian Library's 19th century collections, many of which are out-of-print.

But the authors last month claimed that many of the works Google is making searchable on its website are still copyright-protected. "This is plain and brazen violation of copyright law," said Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild. "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied."

The authors claim that neither the libraries nor Google own the copyright to the books, and that Google should have asked the relevant writers directly for their permission to reproduce the books on its website. "We're not opposed to the basic idea to make books searchable on the internet, but we are opposed to making them searchable without a licence," Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild told MIP.

Google says on its website that it wants to guide users to new or inaccessible books, "all while carefully respecting authors' and publishers' copyrights".

Google will consider all books published after 1922 as copyright-protected, except for unprotected books, such as those published by the US government. In the case of protected books it will not show more than bibliographic information and short pieces of text. Concerning non-US users, the website says that Google will act in line with national laws, adding: "Our plan is to be conservative in our reading of both copyright law and the known facts surrounding a particular book."

The individual authors in the suit are former New York Times editorial writer and fiction author Herbert Mitgang, author Betty Miles, and the 1973-1974 US poet laureate and author Daniel Hoffman. The lawsuit seeks damages and an injunction to stop Google's scanning.

Google last month agreed to temporarily stop its scanning process in response to protests and copyright infringement claims by writers and several publishing groups, including the Text and Academic Authors Association, the Association of American Publishers and the American Association of University Presses.

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By Stéphanie Bodoni, London