The Author’s Guild, a group of over 8,000 authors, has accused Google of “massive copyright infringement,” claiming that the search engine takes the works of the authors which have been licensed to particular public and university libraries and puts them in the public domain, therefore violating their copyrights.  The New York-based non-profit organization says in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan that, “By reproducing for itself a copy of those works that are not in the public domain, Google is engaging in massive copyright infringement. It has infringed, and continues to infringe, the electronic rights of the copyright holders of those works,”.  So what’s Google’s response?  “We regret that this group has chosen litigation to try to stop a program that will make books and the information within them more discoverable to the world,” the company said in a statement.  Google also claims that authors and/or publishers can exclude their books if they don’t want their works included in the index.

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