The Authors Guild is leading a coalition that has sued a group of universities for creating an online library of copyright protected books that they claim were scanned without authorisation.
The US based Guild was joined by authors groups from Australia, the UK and Quebec as well as eight individual authors.
They are suing HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University.
In a statement the Guild has claimed that the universities obtained from Google unauthorised scans of an estimated 7 million copyright-protected books. They have then pooled these books in a repository called HathiTrust and announced plans to allow students and faculty members to download works that it deems “orphaned”.
“These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books,” said Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors.
To read Managing IP’s complete coverage of the controversy over Google Books, please click here.