The Authors Guild and a Lincoln biographer, a children's book author, and a former Poet Laureate of the United States filed a class action suit today in federal court in Manhattan against Google over its unauthorized scanning and copying of books through its Google Library program. The suit alleges that Google is engaging in massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers.

Through its Library program, Google is reproducing works still under the protection of copyright as well as public domain works from the collection of the University of Michigan's library. Google has agreements with four academic libraries — those of Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Michigan — and with the New York Public Library to create digital copies of substantial parts of their collections and to make those collections available for searching online.

“It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

The individual plaintiffs are Herbert Mitgang, a former New York Times editorial writer and the author of fiction and nonfiction books like “The Fiery Trial: A Life of Lincoln,”; Betty Miles, award-winning author of books for children and young adults, and the co-author of “Just Think,”; and Daniel Hoffman, the author and editor of volumes of poetry, translation, and literary criticism, including “Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves and Muir”.

Link: Authors Guild website

When will they realize what Google is doing is online equivalent of what Libraries have been doing for centuries?

This so-called Authors Guild is very litigious by nature. They have fought several class action lawsuits recently including against New York Times. Unfortunately for Google they appear to have good success record.