The Authors Guild suffered a big blow last week in its battle against the wholesale copying of copyrighted books by Google Inc. and its partners.

U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. in Manhattan on Oct. 10 put a stop to a suit by the Guild and its allies against the HathiTrust Digital Library—a massive digitization project involving Google and more than 60 university libraries—ruling that the defendants’ digital reproduction of millions of works is shielded from the authors’ copyright claims.