Authors Guild Files Lawsuit Against Google Books and Partner Universities Over Digitization Rights
For over six years now, the American Authors Guild has been fighting against the digitization and public accessibility of books by Google Books – but so far with little success. This is mainly because the legal dispute between Google and publishers (including the Authors Guild) is still ongoing. This conflict is best known by the name “Google Book Settlement.” Now the Authors Guild is taking a new approach and is attempting in the meantime to halt the digitization of protected works through indirect means, suing U.S. universities that are collaborating with Google in the digitization efforts.
The lawsuits target major universities like the University of Michigan, the University of California, and Cornell University. These institutions have partnered with Google to kickstart their own digitization initiatives. Besides this partnership, most of the sued universities also have an affiliation with HathiTrust, an organization responsible for archiving and distributing eBooks. HathiTrust is also named as one of the defendants in these lawsuits.
The Authors Guild has two distinct objectives with these lawsuits:
The lawsuits do not question that the digitized works remain under copyright, nor that the universities have rights to the printed versions of the books. Instead, they focus on the legality of unauthorized digitization and the fact that the universities have a centralized access point for these works, maintained by HathiTrust. The criticism also extends to the lack of direct control the universities have over the content and the potential risk of a security breach in the system, allowing access to numerous copyright-protected works. To grasp the scale: HathiTrust holds 431 terabytes (= 441,344 gigabytes) of data and 5,111,646 book titles.
The second goal is to address the arbitrary availability of works whose rights holders or authors are unknown and are no longer available for purchase. Such books are provided to students by HathiTrust without restrictions. Harsh words for this approach, which the Authors Guild aims to stop, are voiced by Angelo Loukakis, the Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors: “This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection. These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books“, meaning: “This group of American universities is not authorized to decide whether, when, or how authors lose their copyright protection. These books are not orphaned; they have been hijacked.”
The Authors Guild seeks with this action to halt the further scanning of books and to stop the availability of “orphaned” books by HathiTrust. Moreover, they hope for the seizure of the digitized works on the HathiTrust servers. However, these works should not be deleted, but completely taken offline – at least until the U.S. Congress addresses the issue.
