Authors Guild v Google, Inc.
Authors Guild Sues Google, Alleging Monstrous Copyright Infringement
A lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan against multi-billion worth Google, citing massive copyright infringement. The Authors Guild, a children's book author, a Lincoln biographer, and a former Poet Laureate of the United States filed the lawsuit against Google over its unauthorized scanning and copying of books through its Google Library program. The suit alleges that the search engine and is engaging in massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers.
Through its Library program, Google is reproducing works still under the protection of copyright as well as public domain works from the collection of the University of Michigan's library.
"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," said Authors Guild president Nick Taylor. "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."
Google has agreements with four academic libraries — Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Michigan — and with the New York Public Library to create digital copies of certain parts of their collections and to make those collections available for searching online. Google has not sought the approval of the authors of these works for this program.
The complaint seeks damages and an injunction to stop further infringements.
