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September 21, 2005, 08:23 AM ET
Google Sued Over Library Project
The Authors Guild and three individual writers filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday against Google over the company’s partnership with five major libraries to scan books and place portions of them online. The lawsuit alleges massive copyright infringement, as Google has said it will scan all the books in at least one of the libraries, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, even books that are under copyright.
Company officials have argued that their project is legal because they will make only short excerpts of copyrighted works available. But in a statement, the Authors Guild’s president, Nick Taylor, said, "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."
The lawsuit seeks damages and an end to Google’s scanning of copyrighted books.
For more on Google’s responses to publishers’ objections to the project, see an article from The Chronicle, by Jeffrey R. Young.
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