By Alexandra Cheney
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Google has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of photographers and illustrators claiming the tech giant scanned and posted their works online without their permission or offering payment.
The American Society of Media Photographers and five other organizations filed the copyright infringement lawsuit in Manhattan U.S. District Court Wednesday, seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each of the tens of thousands of illustrations and graphic works that were copied, stored and displayed online by Google, the Associated Press reported.
The suit comes at a time when the California-based company is already embroiled in a five-year-old lawsuit over its move to digitize the world’s literature as part of the Google Books project.
A Manhattan judge has yet to rule on whether to grant a $125 million settlement to the authors and publishers who filed the original lawsuit.
If the settlement is approved, the deal would allow Google to include out-of-print books, called orphans, whose authors could not be found.
“If there is going to be a system developed to manage the compensation for these types of books, we felt visual artists need to be represented,” Eugene Mopsik, executive director of the American Society of Media Photographers, told Wired.com. “We have been totally excluded. We want a seat at the table.”
The Internet-search leader, which reported $23 billion in revenue last year, already has several standing agreements with other writers and publishing groups over use of their material.
“Google Books is an historic effort to make all of the knowledge contained within the world's books searchable online,'' read a statement from Google Inc., according to the AP. ''It exposes readers to information they might not otherwise see, and it provides authors and publishers with a new way to be found.''
The company also claims that Google Books is compliant with U.S. and international copyright law.
The new lawsuit said that Google has scanned upwards of 12 million books containing the combined groups’ work. It claims the move will diminish the value of the works and the ability of creators to license and sell their visual property, damaging the “goodwill and reputation” of artists and photographers.
The lawsuit's plaintiffs include the Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America Inc., the North American Nature Photography Association and the Professional Photographers of America.
