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Authors Guild v. Google Inc. | 770 F. Supp. 2d 666 (2011)
Class-action lawsuits are brought by certain representative parties on behalf of all members of a much larger group, called a class. The court considered whether a proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit was fair to the class in the 2011 case Authors Guild versus Google.
In 2004, Google entered into agreements with leading research libraries to make digital copies of books and other writings in their collections. Since then, Google has scanned more than twelve million books from these libraries’ collections. Google has also delivered digital copies of the scanned books to the participating libraries and created a searchable electronic database that allows users to view snippets of text from the scanned books. Although millions of the books scanned by Google were still under copyright, Google never got permission to scan them.
In 2005, the Authors Guild, the largest association of writers in the United States, filed a class-action lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement in federal district court. Google’s principal defense was fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act, which allows the unauthorized use of copyrighted work for such purposes as scholarship and research. After lengthy negotiations, the Authors Guild and Google reached a proposed settlement agreement in 2008. Notice of the proposed settlement triggered hundreds of objections, so the parties went back to the negotiating table. After some revisions, they filed a proposed Amended Settlement Agreement, or ASA, in 2009.
Among other things, the ASA allowed Google to sell subscriptions to an electronic database of books, share revenues with copyright holders, and establish a registry for distributing revenue from so-called orphan books and other unclaimed works. The ASA required Google to get prior authorization from copyright holders to use in-print books but not out-of-print books. The ASA also allowed copyright holders to opt their books out of the database upon request. In a familiar turn of events, hundreds of class members objected to the ASA.
The parties filed a Rule 23(e) motion for final approval of the class-action settlement on the terms set forth in the ASA.
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