From an article in The Digital Shift:
University of California, Berkeley, law professor Pamela Samuelson, on behalf of more than 80 academics, sent a letter on Monday to Judge Denny Chin asserting that academic authors should not be included as part of a class authorization in the high profile Google Books case, due to fundamental disagreements between the interests of academics and other types of authors.
Samuelson has written and lectured often as a critic of the Google Books case, and of the proposed settlement which was rejected by Chin last year. In her latest letter, she writes that the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs—non-academic authors Betty Miles, Jim Bouton, and Joseph Goulden—“do not share academic values, goals or objectives. None of us would have initiated a lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement in the first place because it scanned our and other academic authors’ books for purposes of indexing their contents and serving up snippets in response to search queries.”
In their recent motion for class certification, the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs are looking to certify the authors of millions of different books as a single class for the purposes of the lawsuit. …
