With hopes for a Google Books settlement dashed, the Authors Guild has filed for class certification in the Google Books litigation, claiming that authors are “passive victims of Google’s digitization campaign.”
If certified, the class action lawsuit will seek statutory damages on behalf of the authors who wrote the millions of books scanned into Google’s digital library. According to Publishers Weekly, Google’s lawyers need to respond to the filing in January.
Here’s more from the Authors Guild’s filing (PDF): “Google’s stated goal has been to copy all of the world’s printed offline books, and Google has acted to accomplish that goal by copying all types of printed offline materials, including books, journals, and dissertations, without authorization from the copyirght owners. Google has copied all types of books, whether in-copyright or out-of-copyright, fiction or non-fiction. Copyirght owners are merely the passive victims of Google’s digitization campaign. Google’s unilateral actions constitute copyright infringement, entitling Google’s victims to statutory damages … as well as declaratory and injunctive relief.”