Authors To Universities: Give Up Your Google Books

In a surprise lawsuit, authors’ groups slammed their one-time university partners with a lawsuit demanding that the schools’ surrender digital collections and stop working with Google.

The lawsuit opens a new phase in the fight over digital libraries and comes the same week that Google’s controversial books settlement is expected to die in court. The lawsuit is a response to a digital book sharing plan announced last month by a group of prominent schools, including Michigan, Cornell, Duke and the University of California. The plan is intended to solve the problem of how to share “orphan works” -- books whose authors can't be found and that for that reason cannot be distributed because of copyright law. Millions of such works, covering everything from cooking to chemistry, now sit largely forgotten on library shelves. The universities want to make digital copies of the orphan works available to their students and scholars beginning in October. Librarians say they will make a careful search for the author before they make a book available and that they will “turn off” the digital copy immediately if an author comes forward. They believe that these steps will make the sharing “fair use,” meaning they would not be liable under copyright laws that call for fines of thousands of dollars every time a work is copied. Authors’ groups are having none of it.