11, Nov 2011

British novelist Fay Weldon and the Pulitzer-winning American biographer TJ Stiles, along with writers from the US, Australia, and Canada, have sued five US universities for copyright infringement. The lawsuit calls the digitization, archiving, copying, and publishing of the copyrighted works by the universities as  one of the largest copyright infringements in history, accusing them of violating the rights of authors and risking the widespread, unauthorized, and irreparable dissemination of millions of digital books.

US writers’ body the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois, and eight individual authors––Weldon Stiles; children’s author Pat Cummings; novelists Angelo Loukakis, Roxana Robinson, and Danièle Simpson; poet André Roy; and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro––have filed suit in Manhattan against the universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Cornell. They claim that the universities obtained from Google unauthorized scans of 7m copyright-protected books–by authors including Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Günter Grass, Michel Houellebecq, Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller, and Haruki Murakami––and created a repository called HathiTrust, which is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

So far, HathiTrust has digitized over 9.5m books (estimates suggest that 27% of them are in the public domain) by collaborating with more than 50 libraries and research institutions.  HathiTrust’s Executive Director John Wilkin in a face-saving measure told the New York Times that the project was a lawful activity aimed at facilitating scholarship.

Clarifying their motive he noted, “First and foremost, this is only a preservation operation. Books are decaying on the shelves. It’s our intention to make them available to people at institutions for scholarly purposes. We are ensuring that the cultural record is preserved.”The authors in dissent have also objected to plans by the universities to make “orphan” works (out-of-print books where the copyright holder cannot be located) available to students and faculty members of the universities. Angelo Loukakis, author and executive director of the Australian Society of Authors,  in a highly critical statement stated that “these aren’t orphaned books, they’re just abducted books. This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights … This group of American universities have no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection.”

“I was stunned when I learned of this,” added novelist Danièle Simpson, president of the Quebec writers’ body. “How are authors from Quebec, Italy or Japan to know that their works have been determined to be ‘orphans’ by a group somewhere in America? If these colleges can make up their own rules, then won’t every college and university, in every country, want to do the same?”

Scott Turow, novelist and president of the Authors Guild, said that “these books, because of the universities’ and Google’s unlawful actions, are now at needless, intolerable digital risk”.

Even worse, Google’s plans to digitize millions of books, creating the world’s biggest digital library, is facing the danger of running into a deadlock over copyright.  Recently, a New York court rejected the settlement the search engine had reached with authors and publishers, declaring  it to be not fair, adequate, and reasonable.