• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 12, 2011

Google's 7-year-old book digitization project has now landed five universities in court for allegedly infringing copyright by accepting scans of 7 million books from Google.

The Authors Guild on Monday asked a federal judge to "impound" scans of all books that are currently held by HathiTrust, a joint digital book-storage project of the University of Michigan, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University and Cornell University.

The lawsuit comes several months after Michigan said it intended to begin allowing students and faculty to download specific "orphan works" or books whose copyright owners can't be found. The university had said it intended to permit downloads of 27 orphan works next month and 140 more in November.

Authors Guild president Scott Turow said in a statement that the plan to allow these downloads is only one reason why the organization opposes the universities' scans.

"These books, because of the universities' and Google's unlawful actions, are now at needless, intolerable digital risk," Turow stated. "Even if it weren't for this preposterous, ad-hoc initiative, we'd have a major problem with the digital repository. Authors shouldn't have to trust their works to a group that's making up the rules as it goes along."

The lawsuit is the latest development to grow out of Google's book digitization project, which involved scanning copies of books from various libraries and making the books searchable. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers opposed the project and sued Google for copyright infringement back in 2005, arguing that it did not have the right to make digital copies of the books.

Although the parties reached a settlement that would have allowed Google to create a digital book registry, that deal was nixed by U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin in New York after opposition by the Justice Department and other groups.

That case is slated to be back in court on Friday.

New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann, who has been following the Google Books litigation closely, says the lawsuit raises at least two questions. The first deals with the legality of the mass digitization project, while the second concerns the libraries' plans for identifying and distributing orphan works.

"This lawsuit mushes those questions together," Grimmelmann says. "It's an open question whether this lawsuit will ultimately be about one, the other, both or neither."