Apparently Google has gotten fed up over the failure of the settlement talks in the copyright lawsuits over Google Books, because it has begun to move toward actually litigating the case. An article in TechWorld notes Google has notified Judge Denny Chin that it plans to file a motion to ask that parts of the 2005 copyright infringement lawsuit and a related 2010 lawsuit be dismissed.
[Judge Chin] set a deadline of Dec. 23 for Google to file the dismissal motions. The plaintiffs will have until Jan. 23 to respond to the motions, and Google will have to reply to the dismissal oppositions by Feb. 3, Chin wrote in the order.
The article notes that even though most people refer to the Google Books case as a single lawsuit, there are actually three separate lawsuits from three different plaintiffs—the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Society of Media Publishers. It is not clear which parts of which lawsuits Google will ask to dismiss, though TechWorld speculates Google might ask to dismiss the authors’ and photographers’ suits but not the publishers’—Google has been having better luck in settlement talks with them than with the other two groups.
It also speculates that the reason the Authors Guild filed a separate lawsuit against the HathiTrust library scanning project in September is that it saw chances of a successful settlement diminishing.
In any event, it looks as though after all these years we may finally start to see the legal issues behind the Google Books project get their day in court. I expect much of the publishing industry will be watching with great interest.
(Found via Slashdot.)
