A group of authors from around the world have sued U.S. universities for letting Google scan millions of books, just days before a federal court will decide the fate of Google's digital library aspirations, the Associated Press reports.
At least five universities–the University of Michigan, University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University–were sued for copyright infringement by trade groups led by the Authors Guild, in a federal court in Manhattan.
The groups are accusing the universities of illegally giving Google over seven million works, which Google has scanned and published in its six-year effort to create a global digital library. The digitization plan was organized by Hathitrust, another defendant on the case. The universities argue that the books were either too old to have copyrights, or "orphaned" works, meaning the authors couldn't be found.
Coincidentally, or not, the fate of Google's digital library dream will be decided in a federal court on September 15.
In 2005, the Authors Guild and other trade associations sued Google for re-printing and cataloguing book snippets without their authors' permission. In October 2008, Google said it would pay $125 million to settle the lawsuit, but the settlement was criticized by parties like the Department of Justice, Microsoft, and Amazon. In March 2011, with a new judge presiding over the case, Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (best known for delivering Bernie Madoff's 150-year prison sentence), overturned the settlement and ordered Google and publishers to re-negotiate a fair agreement, one that doesn't give Google a "de facto monopoloy," he said. The hearing date for this plan is September 15; if the matter isn't resolved, Chin will resolve it himself.
Separately, in June Google teamed up with the British Library to digitize about 250,000 books that are no longer under copyright, like a pamphlet about Marie Antoinette.