Google Wins a Round in Book-Scanning Suit
A federal appeals court on Monday threw out the approval of a class of authors in a long-running lawsuit against Google Inc. over its efforts to electronically scan millions of books from public and university libraries in order to make them available online.
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals said in a ruling Monday that it was “premature” to certify a class, saying the district court should first have to consider Google’s arguments that it could display snippets of the books under the so-called fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. Certifying a class would have allowed the authors to pursue the lawsuit as a group, rather than a series of individual cases.