Freelancers' suit In June 2014, the guild announced final approval of an $18-million settlement of a class-action suit it brought in 2000, along with the
American Society of Journalists and Authors, the
National Writers Union and 21 freelance writers. The suit claimed that major electronics databases such as Lexis-Nexis had violated the rights of thousands of freelancers. Their work had originally appeared in newspapers and magazines including
The New York Times and
Time magazine and had then been resold to the databases without the writers' permission. The publishers had argued that the databases constituted a fair "revision" of the original print articles, but the
United States Supreme Court ruled in June 2001 that the writers must be compensated for their digital rights. Further litigation and negotiation led to a settlement that provided payments to the freelancers of up to $1,500 per article. The specific amount depended on whether (and, if so, when) an infringed article had been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Google Books On September 20, 2005, the Authors Guild, together with
Herbert Mitgang, Betty Miles and Daniel Hoffman, filed a
class action lawsuit against
Google for its Book Search project. According to the Authors Guild, Google was committing copyright infringement by making digital copies of books that were still protected by copyright. (Google countered that their
use was fair according to US copyright law.) On October 28, 2008, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google announced that they had settled
Authors Guild v. Google. Google agreed to a $125 million payout, $45 million of that to be paid to rightsholders whose books were scanned without permission. The
Google Book Search Settlement Agreement allowed for legal protection for Google's scanning project, even though neither side changed its position about whether scanning books was fair use or copyright infringement. The Settlement also would have established a new regulatory organization, the
Book Rights Registry, which would be responsible for allocating fees from Google to rightsholders. The settlement between the Authors Guild and Google was rejected in 2011 by a judge at the district court level, who thought the settlement was not in the authors' best interest. In October 2015, the
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with Google citing
fair use and that the scanned and posted excerpts works do not harm the authors by having parts of the books online. In late December 2015, the Authors Guild filed a petition for
writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court against Google in their long-standing battle over whether copyright laws allow for the search engine to scan and post excerpts from books for the
Google Books service, which in April 2016 declined to
review the case, leaving the lower court's decision standing.
HathiTrust From 2012 to 2015, the Authors Guild was involved in a legal case regarding
HathiTrust, a similar service to Google Books allowing the searching of copyrighted scanned books and the displaying of snippets. As in the Google Books case, this was found to be fair use, and the case was dropped.
NEH In May 2025, the guild filed a class action lawsuit against the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as well as
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officials for terminating $175 million in committed grants from Congressional funds. According to the filed lawsuit, the mass termination was considered to be "not only utterly unexpected and unprecedented—it was flagrantly unlawful", as these actions directly violated the
Administrative Procedure Act. ==Notable people==