GLOBAL: Authors sue universities over 'orphan' works

Authors have accused five American universities of "engaging in one of the largest copyright infringements in history" over a plan to digitise out-of-print books and provide them online to students, writes Nick Allen for The Telegraph.

Writers from the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada are suing the universities, claiming they obtained unauthorised scans of an estimated seven million copyright-protected books from the internet giant Google. The University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University and Cornell University are accused of pooling the unauthorised files at the University of Michigan.

The legal complaint was filed in New York by groups including the Authors Guild, which has more than 8,000 members in the US, and eight individual authors. They accuse the universities of wanting to allow unlimited downloads of so-called orphan works, which are out-of-print books whose writers could not be located.
Full report on The Telegraph site