The Authors Guild filed an appeal in November 2012 after Judge Harold Baer of the District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed its copyright infringement case against HathiTrust, the group of libraries, in October that year.
The libraries had provided millions of works to be scanned for the Google Books project, in exchange for receiving digital copies of the works from the search engine.
Ruling that the libraries were covered by the fair use exemption, Judge Harold Baer of the District Court for the Southern District of New York described Google Books as an “invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts”. He also stressed that the project’s goal of making books available digitally to the visually impaired was in the public interest.
The case is Authors Guild v Hathitrust. The Authors Guild has also separately sued Google for copyright infringement.
On Tuesday, 133 academic authors filed the brief in support of HathiTrust. The brief argued that “most of the in-copyright works in the HathiTrust digital library were written by scholars motivated to share the knowledge their works contain” and that “scholars benefit from HathiTrust’s fair use by using its digital library for research”.
The brief also claimed that the Authors Guild is overreaching in its claims concerning 7.3 million books involved in the project. It said the guild has identified only 116 works in which its members claim to hold copyrights. The brief argued that the guild “asserted an entitlement to litigate this case and to attain injunctive relief that goes far beyond what the law allows”.
The scholars’ submission follows another amicus brief in support of HathiTrust, filed on Monday by the Library Copyright Alliance.
In March this year, the AAP, MPAA, Associated Press, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors filed amicus briefs in support of the Authors Guild.
