MANHATTAN (CN) - The Authors Guild and writers groups from Australia and Quebec sued five major universities, to block distribution of unauthorized digital copies of millions of copyrighted works from the universities' libraries. Eight individual authors also sued, claiming the universities "engaged in a concerted, systematic and widespread campaign to digitize, reproduce, distribute and otherwise exploit millions of copyrighted works in their libraries without permission from the copyright holders associated with those works."
Named as defendants are the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, Cornell University and HathiTrust, the universities' library partnership organization.
The universities, which partnered with Google to digitize their library collections, are planning to provide full-text access to so-called orphan works, whose copyright owners cannot be located, the writers say in their federal complaint.
"Through cooperation agreements entered into with Google Inc. ('Google'), defendants have engaged in an unprecedented effort to 'digitize' - or to create digital copies of - all or a significant portion of the works in their libraries without the permission of their authors or other copyright holders," the complaint states.
"In exchange for allowing Google to create, take and commercially exploit millions of digital copies of books and other materials in their university libraries, Google has agreed to provide and has already provided the universities with digital copies of plaintiffs' and millions of others' books for the universities to exploit. Led by the University of Michigan, the universities created and joined HathiTrust, a partnership of more than fifty research institutions and libraries that have already begun to and, unless enjoined by this court, will continue to combine their digital libraries to create a shared digital repository that already contains almost 10 million digital volumes, approximately 73 percent of which are protected by copyright. This so-called HathiTrust Digital Library ('HDL') is responsible for creating and distributing additional unauthorized digital copies of millions of copyrighted works, including works owned by plaintiffs, and risking the potentially catastrophic, widespread dissemination of those millions of works in derogation of the statutorily-defined framework governing library books."
HathiTrust, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., was created in 2008 by several major universities and research institutions as a repository to archive and share their digitized library collections. The defendant universities have contributed more than 8 million digital volumes to the HathiTrust library, according to the complaint.
The writers says the universities defend their "systematic digital copying" by invoking the fair-use doctrine of the U.S. Copyright Act, which allows libraries to reproduce and distribute copyrighted works for preservation purposes and as replacement for published works.
But the writers say the universities' digital lending disregards the restrictions of the Copyright Act, which limits the number of digital copies libraries can make and prohibits libraries from distributing digital copies outside their premises or archives.
"In blatant derogation of plaintiffs' exclusive rights under Section 106 and the express regulations governing libraries' rights under Section 108 of the Copyright Act, defendants have engaged in a concerted, systematic and widespread campaign to digitize, reproduce, distribute and otherwise exploit millions of copyrighted works in their libraries without permission from the copyright holders associated with those works," according to the complaint.
The authors say that "since commencing the digitization project, Google and its partners have digitized more than 12 million books."
They say the digitization project may be worth millions of dollars to the universities and their partners.
