Authors Guild Sues Google, Citing ‘Massive Copyright Infringement’

The Authors Guild and some individual authors filed a class action suit yesterday in federal court in Manhattan against Google, alleging that its Google Library program is a massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers, the group said in a statement.

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, the group said.

“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” said Authors Guild president Nick Taylor in the statement. “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 substantial 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 group said.

Google was not immediately reachable for comment.