Authors Guild sues universities over online books

NEW YORK – Authors and authors' groups have filed a federal lawsuit in New York City to stop universities from creating online libraries with millions of scanned books.

The Authors Guild and the Australian Society of Authors were among groups joining eight individual authors to file a copyright infringement lawsuit on Monday in Manhattan.

The authors said they obtained from Google Inc. the unauthorized scans of an estimated seven million copyright-protected books. They claimed universities in California, Indiana and Wisconsin pooled the unauthorized files into a repository organized by the University of Michigan.

A spokeswoman for the University of Michigan said she was pursuing comment.