[JURIST] The Authors Guild [advocacy website], an advocacy organization for published writers, together with a former Poet Laureate, a Lincoln biographer and a children's book author, Tuesday sued search engine and advertising giant Google [press release; complaint, PDF] alleging "massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers." The class action suit filed in federal court in Manhattan alleges that Google [Google backgrounder] has engaged in unauthorized scanning and copying of books through its Google Print Library Project [Google backgrounder; advocacy copyright analysis, PDF]. The project, which involves the scanning and digitizing of library books, is a "plain and brazen violation of copyright law" according to Nick Taylor, the president of the Authors Guild, who added:

It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.