Authors Guild Sues Google Over Print Program

heavy snowfall writes to tell us that The Authors Guild has filed a class action lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit claims that Google's scanning and digitizing of library books as a part of the Google Print Project constitutes "massive copyright infringement". In addition to the lawsuit The Authors Guild has also issued a press release to explain its actions.

Comments

That raises the question then...

[Svartalf]

...If the Libraries in question have a license to produce copies, does that mean that the same license is extendable to what Google is doing?

If so, then this case is waste of everyone's time as it's not brazen infringement- it's an issue of someone taking umbrage over something that they're (Google and the Libraries...) already entitled to do; it's just something that the authors in the class action suit didn't realize might happen as a result of the licensing. (Of course, that doesn't entitle them to filing a suit just because they didn't like those results...)

If not, then Google either needs to get the right licenses themselves- or not publish those works that aren't in the Public Domain and they don't have an appropriate license for- and it IS infringement.