28 September, 2011

Google, Books & Copyright

On September 12 this year, the Authors Guild in the USA, the Australian Society of Authors, the Quebec Union of Writers and a number of individual authors filed suit against a partnership of five American universities and research libraries (the same universities involved in the Google Books case), over what the plaintiffs described as “one of the largest copyright infringements in history”. [1]

According to the Complaint [2]: “The Universities have directly caused millions of works that are protected by copyright holders to be scanned, stored in digital format, repeatedly copied and made available online for various uses. These actions not only violate the exclusive rights of copyright holders…but, by creating at least two databases connected to the Internet that store millions of digital copies of copyrighted books, the Universities risk the widespread, unauthorised and irreparable dissemination of these works.”

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