Judge Baer has granted HathiTrust’s motion for summary judgment. In a 23-page opinion, he ruled in favor of HathiTrust and the print-disabled defendants on every substantive legal issue. The opinion concludes that search indexing and providing access to the print-disabled are both fair uses. An appeal is possible, but for now, the ruling marks a [...]
In a brief order filed today, the Second Circuit agreed to hear Google’s appeal of class certification immediately. The order means that Google’s appeal of class certification will proceed in parallel with Judge Chin’s consideration of fair use.
The parties have filed their complete sets of briefs in the HathiTrust case. Oral argument is scheduled for Monday, August 6 at 3:00 PM.
Today, Judge Chin issued an opinion granting class certification. The Authors Guild lawsuit will proceed as a class action on behalf of: All persons residing in the United States who hold a United States copyright interest in one or more Books reproduced by Google as part of its Library Project, who are either (a) natural [...]
The Authors Guild announced today that it had filed a lawsuit against the HathiTrust and five of its members, including the Universities of Michigan and California. The suit challenges the libraries’ use of the scans they have received from Google: The universities obtained from Google unauthorized scans of an estimated 7 million copyright-protected books, the [...]
Four more universities have joined the orphan works effort spearheaded by the University of Michigan; they will make books identified as orphans available digitally to their own students, faculty, and affiliates. Meanwhile, in France, the publisher La Martinière joined Hachette Livre in cutting a voluntary deal with Google for the scanning and sale of its [...]
The Second Circuit issued a decision today in another copyright class-action settlement case with the ungainly caption of In re: Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation. The opinion rejected the settlement there because the class contained members with strongly diverging interests, depending on the strength of their copyright claims against the defendants. The court [...]
What do Wal-Mart and Google Books have in common, beyond their immensity? This is the question raised by a new letter sent to the court by Robert Kunstadt and Ilaria Maggioni, who direct the court’s attention to the recent Supreme Court decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, which rejected a class of female employees of Wal-Mart. [...]
The University of Michigan has been studying which of the digitized books it holds are orphans. That project is described here, including the workflow process: Note that two different people follow the same workflow for each volume, which is a built-in protection against making errors. We attempt to make contact with the potential copyright holder [...]