by Jonathan Stempel, GMA News
Google Inc notched a legal victory in its bid to create the world’s largest digital books library, winning the reversal of a court order that had allowed authors challenging the project to sue as a group. A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said Circuit Judge Denny Chin prematurely certified a class of authors without first deciding if the “fair use” defense under U.S. copyright law allowed Google to display snippets of books. The three-judge panel also signaled it may prove improper to allow a class action on behalf of potentially hundreds of thousands of writers arguing that the Google Books Library Project improperly copied their works without permission. “Putting aside the merits of Google’s claim that plaintiffs are not representative of the certified class — an argument which, in our view, may carry some force — we believe that the resolution of Google’s fair use defense in the first instance will necessarily inform and perhaps moot our analysis of many class certification issues,” the panel said.
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