US authors to sue over Google Print Library project

M2 Best Books, Sept 21, 2005

Internet company Google Inc is to face legal action in a federal court over its plans to scan copyrighted books for its Google Print Library project.

As part of the project, which involves five libraries, Google was digitalising books to make them searchable at http://print.google.com. Publishers and authors were, however, extremely critical of the idea.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday (20 September) by The Authors Guild and writers Herbert Mitgang, Betty Miles and Daniel Hoffman, all of whom were named as co-plantiffs in the suit. The US writers claim that the Google project infringes the copyrights of individual authors.

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According to Reuters, the lawsuit seeks class action status, asks for damages and demands an injunction to halt further infringements.

Google had previously said that copyright holders could apply for their books to be excluded from the scheme, however the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) argued that this logic was "backwards" and that Google should first have approached representatives of writers and publishers to negotiate a fee for using the works.

A three-month pause in the scanning of copyrighted books for the Google Print Library project was announced by Google in August this year.