Authors' Guild Goes After University Book Digitization Projects

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Ars Technica: "With the planned settlement between Google and book publishers still on indefinite hold, a legal battle by proxy has started. Google partnered with many libraries at US universities in order to gain access to the works it wants to digitize. Now, several groups that represent book authors have filed suit against those universities, attempting to block both digital lending and an orphaned works project. The suit is being brought by the Authors' Guild, its equivalents in Australia, Quebec, and the UK, and a large group of individual authors. Its target: some major US universities, including Michigan, the University of California system, and Cornell. These libraries partnered with Google to get their book digitization efforts off the ground and, in return, Google has provided them with digital copies of the works. These and many other universities have also become involved with the HathiTrust, an organization set up to help them archive and distribute digital works; the HathiTrust is also named as a defendant."

Simple solution

[Gravis Zero]

a) do not digitize any of the books of authors in the Authors Guild that do not request their books be digitized.
b) pull the books of authors in the Authors Guild from the school library and all curriculum that do not give express permission to digitize their books.

be careful what you ask for because you might just get it and more.

This is not about public domain works

[bgalbrecht]

They're not suing the universities and HathiTrust over 200 year old books which are in the public domain, they're suing over books which are clearly copyrighted because the US copyright was renewed and has not lapsed, but universities and HathiTrust can't find the current copyright holders. One of the four factors of fair use in the US is the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes. In this case, the universities and HathiTrust claim the digitizing these works and making them available to students and faculty is fair use, and the authors/Authors Guilds are claiming this is too broad an interpretation of this factor in determining fair use.