Judge Denny Chin has dealt Google a setback today in the Google Books scanning lawsuit, ruling (PDF) against Google’s arguments that the Author’s Guild should not be allowed to stand in for its individual members and that the three individual plaintiffs should be denied class-action status.
Google had argued that individual plaintiff participation would be necessary to decide on issues of fair use, but the judge didn’t agree. Google had also argued that the three plaintiffs weren’t sufficiently representative of all classes of book publishing as a whole, but Chin felt books could be considered by category—they didn’t have to be considered book by book. Chin was also unimpressed by a (Google-sponsored) survey that claimed the majority of authors were fine with Google scanning their works.
The ruling means that authors interested in taking part will have an easier time finding attorneys given the prospect of large class-action damages, and also that the Authors Guild will be able to lend financial support going forward. From here, the trial will proceed to consider Google’s fair use arguments.
Who knows? Maybe one of these days we’ll actually see a ruling.
