Photo: Amadeus ex Machina /Flickr Google is on the hook for as much as $2 billion in damages for digitally scanning 2.7 million university library books without permission, the Authors Guild claims in a long-running lawsuit testing the limits of U.S. copyright law. Google in 2004 made a deal with several universities to scan their libraries, without the rights holders’ permission, and make “snippets” of those books available online via Google’s search engine. The Mountain View, California, search giant was subsequently sued by individual writers, publishers and the Authors Guild — litigation that has had a tortured history that resulted in a settlement a federal judge rejected last year . Now the battle is back on. The guild is seeking the minimum $750 in copyright damages per each allegedly infringing work — making it potentially among the highest copyright damages cases in litigation history. The recording industry sought about $1 billion from peer-to-peer file-sharing service Limewire, but eventually settled for $105 million.

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Authors Guild Seeks $2 Billion From Google for Book Scanning