US Authors' Guild sues Google

By Steve Malone

Posted on 21 Sep 2005 at 11:32

The US Authors' Guild suing Google over copyright infringement. In a class action with the biographer of Abraham Lincoln biographer, a children's book author, and a former Poet Laureate of the United States, the guild alleges that the search engine is 'massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers'.

Google Print is a service whereby searchers can find information about a book, read extracts and buy it. Full text of a work is limited to those that are out of copyright.

The company has deals with four academic libraries, Stanford, Harvard, and Michigan in the US and the British Oxford University as well as the New York Public Library to digitise, their collections to make them searchable online. The Authors' Guild says that Google has not sought the approval of the authors of these works for this programme.

The Guild says it can prove that 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 the 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, for its part points out that any copyright holder can elect to have their works withheld from the programme. It also says that Google does not show a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program unless the copyright holder has given permission to show more. In a blog entry Susan Wojcicki, Google's Vice President of Product Management said, ' We regret that this group chose to sue us over a program that will make millions of books more discoverable to the world'.

Google announced the digitisation of texts in December 2004 - Google in plan to scan and index some of the world's top libraries. However, in August 2005, the Association of American Publishers announced its reservations about the project - it said that Google's approach 'stands copyright law on its head' by transferring the responsibility for avoiding copyright infringement from the infringer to the copyright holder.