Authors win class status through Google Books

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(Reuters) - thousands of authors about his plan, which will create the world's largest digital book library, can sue Google Inc in a class action lawsuit a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

U.S. circuit judge Denny Chin in Manhattan also Google's bid to dismiss the authors Guild and several groups, photographers and graphic designers, which individually would have forced their members complaints claims rejected.

Plaintiff in the seven-year-old case have complained that Google's plan for the library, the millions of out-of-print works would include, "massive copyright infringement."

The case originated digital copy from Google's 2004 agreements with several large research libraries books and other writings for their Google Books website, with the aim of help Explorer and locate the public materials.

Google has since more than 12 million scanned books, but planned only excerpts online to say that this activity constituted "fair use" under U.S. copyright law.

Chin said it would be for authors to sue, as a group, rather than different results and the "exponentially" increased costs of individual processes more efficient.

He also said, it unjust, would be the authors Guild, photographers and other groups of the American Society of media Sue persons individually "return due to the nature and indiscriminately Google's unauthorized copying."

The litigation combines complaints against Google mountain view, California-based 2005 on behalf of the authors, and in 2010 for photographers and graphic designers.

A Google spokesperson said in a statement via e-Mail: "as we have said all along that we are confident that Google Books is fully compliant with copyright law."

Lawyers for the plaintiffs not immediately responded to requests for comment.

In March 2011 Chin cited antitrust and copyright concerns at the comprehensive rejection a proposed 125 million scheme, say that went "too far" in Google effectively let it perform "wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission."

Chin was supervised the Federal Appeals Court in New York, but held jurisdiction over the Google case, which he had started in 2010 as a judge.

The cases are the authors Guild et al. v. Google Inc., U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, no. 05-08136; and American Society of media photographers, et al. v. Google Inc. in the same court, no. 10-02977.

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