The Australian Society of Authors has joined the USA’s Authors Guild, the Quebec Union of Writers and a number of individual authors in filing suit against a partnership of research libraries and five universities which have digitised a large number of books without permission from the authors.

The complaint submitted in a US District Court claims that the universities obtained unauthorised scans from Google of an estimated seven million copyright-protected books: “By digitising, archiving, copying and now publishing the copyrighted works without the authorisation of those works’ rightsholders, the universities are engaged in one of the largest copyright infringements in history.” [1]

Individual authors involved in the suit include Australian author Angelo Loukakis, Fay Weldon and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro. The universities named in the suit are the University of Michigan, University of California, University of Wisconson, Indiana University and Cornell University.

Rather than seeking damages, the plaintiffs are asking that the books be taken off the universities’ servers and held by a trustee.

For more details, click on the link below.

[1] New York Times at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/business/media/authors-sue-to-remove-books-from-digital-archive.html