Google Book Project in the campus news

Hey!  An article in the Badger Herald this morning connects directly to our lecture from Tuesday:

Five universities participating in efforts to digitize books for student usage, including the University of Wisconsin, are battling a lawsuit over copyright protections filed by author guilds and authors.

The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Quebec Writers Union and eight separate authors filed the suit Monday afternoon, stating the digitalization of the universities’ library books violated authors’ copyright protections.

This digitization effort targets the sued universities’ participation in HathiTrust, which contains approximately 10 million digital files as a result of working with Google since 2004, according to Deputy Director of UW Libraries Ed Van Gemert.

Headed by the University of Michigan, HathiTrust is a collaboration of more than 40 universities that first create digital copies of their books and then combine these digital libraries.

Authors Guild President Scott Turow said this digitalization threatens the books’ rightful preservation.

“These books, because of the universities’ and Google’s unlawful actions, are now at needless, intolerable digital risk,” Turow said in a recent Authors Guild press release.

The Library Copyright Alliance — which includes the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries — disagrees with the lawsuit, according to a statement released Wednesday.

“We are deeply disappointed by the Authors Guild’s decision to file a lawsuit […] against HathiTrust and its research library partners,” the statement said. “The case has no merit and completely disregards the rights of libraries and their users under the law, especially fair use.”

Read the rest here and tell me what you think.