The Authors Guild suffered a setback on Oct. 10 in its battle against the wholesale copying of copyrighted books by Google Inc. and its partners.
Southern District Judge Harold Baer Jr. (See Profile) in The Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, 11-cv-6351 (HB) put a stop to a suit by the Guild and its allies against the HathiTrust Digital Librarya massive digitization project involving Google and more than 60 university librariesruling that the defendants’ digital reproduction of millions of works provides an “invaluable contribution to the progress of science” that is shielded from the authors’ copyright claims.
