The University of Michigan has suspended its orphan works digitisation project in response to the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it and four other universities, including Cornell. According to Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, the system for identifying orphan works is now being rebuilt to ensure that no mistakes are repeated. The re-examination of orphan works has already started, but there is no concrete date for when the university will next put up a set of works for use by its communities.
The lawsuit, filed on September 12, claims that Google and the five universities — Cornell, the University of Michigan, Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California — have digitised about 7 million books illegally. The majority of the contested texts are known as ‘orphan works’ — books that are still subject to copyright but whose copyright holders are unknown or cannot be located.
Paul Aiken J.D., Executive Director of the Authors Guild, said the suspension was a start to appeasing the authors’ societies and individual authors that filed the suit. It did not, however, reconcile all of the accusations of the lawsuit, he said.
Ed Van Gemert, Deputy Director of Libraries at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Michigan was the first of the five universities being sued to respond to the lawsuit because it was the leader in the HathiTrust project — a collaborative initiative of universities that aspires to build a digital archive. Michigan developed the process to examine and identify copyright material for possible orphan works, opening up access.
Both parties agreed that the goal is to protect the rights of the authors whose work is being digitised. The Authors Guild presently believes that the only way to do this is through litigation, according to Aiken.
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