An international group of authors including the British novelist Fay Weldon and the Pulitzer-winning American biographer TJ Stiles, along with writers from the US, Australia and Canada, are suing five American universities for copyright infringement, accusing them of violating the rights of authors and risking "the widespread, unauthorised and irreparable dissemination" of millions of digital books.

American writers' body the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois and eight individual authors – Weldon, Stiles, children's author Pat Cummings, novelists Angelo Loukakis, Roxana Robinson and Danièle Simpson, poet André Roy and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro – have filed suit in Manhattan against the universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Indiana and Cornell. They claim the universities obtained unauthorised scans of 7m copyright-protected books from Google – by authors including Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Günter Grass, Michel Houellebecq, Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller and Haruki Murakami – and pooled the files in a repository called HathiTrust, which is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit [PDF].

The lawsuit calls the digitisation, archiving, copying and publishing of the copyrighted works "one of the largest copyright infringements in history", saying that the actions "not only violate the exclusive rights of copyright holders to authorise the reproduction and distribution of their works but, by creating at least two databases connected to the internet that store millions of digital copies of copyrighted books, the universities risk the widespread, unauthorised and irreparable dissemination of those works".

Google's plans to digitise millions of books, creating the world's biggest digital library, have already run into trouble over copyright.

In March, a New York judge rejected the settlement the search engine had reached with authors and publishers, saying it was "not fair, adequate and reasonable", with a new hearing on that case scheduled for 15 September.

Seeking the impounding of all unauthorised digital works, Weldon and her fellow authors are also objecting to plans by the universities to make "orphan" works (out-of-print books where the copyright holder cannot be located) available to students and faculty members of the universities. They say the first set of "so-called" orphans – 27 works by French, Russian and American writers – will be released on 13 October, with a further 140 books due to be released in November.

"These aren't orphaned books, they're abducted books," said Angelo Loukakis, author and executive director of the Australian Society of Authors. "This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors' rights … This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection."

"I was stunned when I learned of this," added novelist Danièle Simpson, president of the Quebec writers' body. "How are authors from Quebec, Italy or Japan to know that their works have been determined to be 'orphans' by a group in Ann Arbor, Michigan? If these colleges can make up their own rules, then won't every college and university, in every country, want to do the same?"

Scott Turow, novelist and president of the Authors Guild, said that "these books, because of the universities' and Google's unlawful actions, are now at needless, intolerable digital risk". "Even if it weren't for this preposterous, ad-hoc initiative, we'd have a major problem with the digital repository. Authors shouldn't have to trust their works to a group that's making up the rules as it goes along," he said.

While not part of the US lawsuit, UK authors' body the Society of Authors said it "absolutely supported" the action. "If you see a child alone in a playground that doesn't mean it's an orphan," said general secretary Nicola Solomon. "People really need to think about that when they say a book is ownerless … There are bound to be lots of works put up and identified as orphans which just aren't."

HathiTrust is a partnership of more than 50 libraries and research institutions, which has digitised over 9.5m books, of which it estimates that 27% are in the public domain. Executive director John Wilkin told the New York Times that the project was "a lawful activity and important work for scholarship".

"This is a preservation operation, first and foremost," he said. "Books are decaying on the shelves. It's our intention to make them available to people at institutions for scholarly purposes. We are ensuring that the cultural record is preserved."