Judge Denny Chin

Each summer, we would go as a family to Gettysburg to watch the Civil War re-enactments of the great battle and the turning of the tide of the war in the Union favor.  We walked around the battlefields and the staged campsites, and my father planted bullets he had bought at antique markets for us to "find."  Together we pretended to hold the Union line on Little Round Top where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain led the fabled 20th Maine in a heroic stand.  

The eight-year-long legal battle over Google Books has finally come to a close. A judge ruled on Thursday that the search giant's scanning of millions of books falls under fair use and doesn't infringe the copyrights of the books' authors. The ruling (.PDF), issued by U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in New York, ends the legal scuffle among the publishing trade group The Authors Guild, several individual authors and Google, as first reported by GigaOM. Google began scanning books in 2004 with the goal of publishing snippets in search results. 

Well, the lengthy legal battle over Google Books may be coming to a close. According to cNet, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in New York rejected authors’ arguments against digitizing books without copyright holder permission, and he granted Google’s motion for summary judgment. I’m sure Chris Meadows will chime in on this since he’s more up [...]

The post Judge Dismisses Authors’ Case Against Google Books appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Google cites everything from Mad Men to minority rights in a fresh attempt to bolster its claim that the scanning of millions of books qualifies as a “fair use” under copyright law. The arguments, set out in court filings submitted on Friday, come as Google’s long-running dispute with the Authors Guild heads toward an end game.

According to Google, its massive book scanning project is fair use because the scanning has delivered many public benefits without harming authors.

Judge Denny Chin has dealt Google a setback today in the Google Books scanning lawsuit, ruling (PDF) against Google’s arguments that the Author’s Guild should not be allowed to stand in for its individual members and that the three individual plaintiffs should be denied class-action status. Google had argued that individual plaintiff participation would be [...]

More than a year after Judge Denny Chin blew up an epic settlement agreement, Google and the Authors Guild are back in court today.

The Guild is suing its former partner for scanning books without permission while a group representing photographers is also appearing before Chin to press copyright claims of its own.

At today’s hearing the Authors Guild is set to ask Chin to confirm that the country’s writers can sue together. Google is opposing the request while also seeking to throw out the Authors Guild and photographers’ complaints altogether.