Google Books Lawsuit Lurches Forward

The fate of Google’s massive book scanning project has been up in the air since a legal settlement collapsed last year. New court filings this week suggest a possible end game.

The filings come after the Authors Guild decided in December to restart a class action lawsuit that demands Google pay authors for scanning their works without permission. The case was on hold for years as authors and publishers pursued an ambitious three-way deal to split digital book revenue with Google. After Judge Denny Chin rejected the deal last March, publishers have not gone forward with their original lawsuit and some have instead struck their own deals with Google. Google is responding to the revived lawsuit by trying to knock the Authors Guild out of the case on the grounds that it doesn’t have legal standing. If a court agree, this would force the three remaining individual plaintiffs in the case to continue to wage an expensive legal battle on their own.