U. S. Judge Allows Class-Action Suit over Google’s Book Scanning

June 1, 2012

31 May 2012. A federal judge in Manhattan granted class-action status on Thursday to authors suing Google over the company’s ambitious book-scanning project, allowing the long-stalled case to move forward.

Google argued last month that the authors should instead take action individually, but Judge Denny Chin rejected that argument in a written decision, saying that class action “is the superior method for resolving this litigation.”

“It is, without question, more efficient and effective than requiring thousands of authors to sue individually,” he wrote. “Requiring this case to be litigated on an individual basis would risk disparate results in nearly identical suits and exponentially increase the cost of litigation.”

The Authors Guild applauded the decision. “This is a key ruling for all U.S. authors whose literary works have been appropriated by Google,” Paul Aiken, the executive director of the guild, said in a statement.

http://nyti.ms/L8lchJ

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