IU, 4 other universities sued by global writers’ unions

Three authors’ unions and eight authors announced Monday that they are suing IU, as well as four other American universities and the company HathiTrust, for a violation of authors’ rights.

The unions claim that a program with online storage of millions of books for use by the universities is illegal, as the books are protected by copyright laws but are not sufficiently protected by the universities.

IU Associate Vice President for University Communications Mark Land said Tuesday that IU had just learned of the lawsuit and was still formulating a response.

The Authors’ Guild, the Australian Society of Authors and l’Union des ecrivaines et des ecrivains quebecois (UNEQ, a Quebec writers’ union) are suing IU, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California and the HathiTrust company, which was set up by U of M to operate a digital book program.

The unions claim that the universities are unfairly categorizing many of their authors’ works as “orphans,” which would allow the universities to freely distribute the texts using Google and the HathiTrust company without violating copyright laws.

The “orphan” distinction was established by the HathiTrust company and U of M to classify books that are protected by copyright laws but whose owners could not be located by the company.

“I was stunned to learn that one of my works is, in their eyes, ‘orphaned,’ when I am indeed alive and active,” UNEQ President Daniele Simpson said in a press release.

“How can the authors of Quebec, Italy or Japan know that their works were declared ‘orphans’ by a group in Ann Arbor, Mich.? If these universities can make up their own rules, why wouldn’t universities around the world do the same?”

The first batch of texts, 27 works by French, Russian and American authors, are to be released to approximately 250,000 students Oct. 13. An additional 140 works are scheduled to be released for unlimited download in November.

The unions said HathiTrust has digitized approximately 7 million files, including thousands of works representing every nation on Earth.

The company digitized 65,000 works published in the year 2001 alone, the groups said, including thousands of works published that year from all over the world.

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

— Zach Ammerman