Google, authors tussle in court

Google urged a judge to toss The Authors Guild and an organization representing photographers out of 6-year-old litigation over the future of the world's largest digital library, a move that would force authors and photographers to individually fight the online search engine giant.

Google attorney Daralyn Durie told Judge Denny Chin in federal court in Manhattan that authors and photographers would be better off fending for themselves because their circumstances varied so widely. Joanne Zack, a lawyer for The Authors Guild, countered that the judge should certify the authors as a class because millions of them would not have the money to go to court and because the potential financial reward for doing so would not be high enough to make it practical. She said they also might be intimidated fighting a company as large as Google. "A lot of them don't even know their books have been digitized," she said.