While we wait to see the class certification motion due today in the principal Google Books case, I thought I’d take a moment to check in on the other litigation burbling around it.
In the visual artists’ case against Google, American Society of Media Photographers v. Google, Google started the machinery to move to dismiss the case on procedural grounds: that neither the individual artists nor their associations were proper plaintiffs with standing to sue. The plaintiffs asked for and were given a chance to amend their complaint, and they filed the revised version a few weeks ago. Judge Chin then put them on the same schedule as the main case: Google’s motion to dismiss is due on December 23, with responses and replies in the new year.
Meanwhile, in the case against Google’s library partners, Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the National Federation for the Blind made a surprise motion to intervene as a defendant, along with two visually disabled college students and a visually disabled professor. They argued that the scans can and will be used by the libraries to make their books more accessible to the blind, and that this is an interest the libraries themselves won’t necessarily defend adequately. Copyright scholar Peter Jaszi is one of the lawyers on the brief. That motion was filed today, so there hasn’t been much reaction to it yet.
We’ve uploaded all of the relevant documents to The Public Index as usual, and we’ve broken out separate pages for the visual artists’ and HathiTrust suits.