Google dealt blow in book scanning lawsuit. From @arstechnica

The coalition of authors suing to stop Google Book Search scored a key victory on Thursday as the judge overseeing the case ruled that three individual authors and the Author's Guild could represent the class of all authors whose works had been scanned by Google. Google had sought the opposite result, arguing that including all authors in a single lawsuit would make the case too complex, and that most authors actually supported the scanning project.

Judge Denny Chin, who rejected a controversial settlement of the case last year, ruled on two distinct legal issues. The first was over whether the Author's Guild was entitled to serve as a representative of its members. Google had argued that only individual authors could be plaintiffs because the case will require the participation of those individual plaintiffs to consider issues such as fair use.

But Judge Chin rejected Google's argument. "The associations' claims of copyright infringement and requests for injunctive relief will not require the participation of each individual association member," he wrote.

More importantly, Judge Chin gave the green light for three individual plaintiffs—Betty Miles, Joseph Goulden, and Jim Bouton—to represent the vastly larger class of "persons residing in the United States who hold a United States copyright interest in one or more Books reproduced by Google as part of its Library Project."

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