Yahoo Becomes Second to Deny Google Data
Google suffered another setback in its efforts to defend its digital book library when rival Yahoo declined to provide information to assist with an upcoming copyright infringement lawsuit revolving around its digital-book scanning program.
Yahoo responded to a Google subpoena and objected to providing information for two upcoming court battles Google will face against the Author’s Guild and McGraw-Hill Companies. The plaintiffs accuse Google of digitizing material without prior consent from the copyright holder. Google had hoped to gain information about how its competitors had undertaken similar projects.
Yahoo said in its Nov. 20 filling to the United States District Court in the Northern District of California that the information Google sought was an “overbroad and unreasonable attempt to obtain confidential and trade secret documents from one of its chief competitors.”
“Yahoo is not a party to the underlying action against Google relating to book scanning, does not have a book-scanning program of its own, and has no information that is remotely relevant to the Google Action,” the company said in the filling.
Yahoo, a popular Internet service company, took the same route Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer, took in October when it balked at a similar subpoena. In addition to Yahoo and Amazon, Google had requested information from the Association of American Publishers, HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck Publishers, Microsoft and Random House.
