Brief of Amici Curiae Academic Authors in Support of Defendant-Appellant and Reversal by Pamela Samuelson, David Hansen :: SSRN

Pamela Samuelson and David Hansen

SSRN Social Science Research Network, (16 Nov 2012)

From the Abstract: Filed in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Support of Defendant-Appellant Google. Summary of argument: Class certification was improperly granted below because the District Court failed to conduct a rigorous analysis of the adequacy of representation factor, as Rule 23(a)(4) requires. The three individual plaintiffs who claim to be class representatives are not academics and do not share the commitment to broad access to knowledge that predominates among academics. Although the District Court, in rejecting the proposed Google Books settlement last year, recognized that the class representatives and their lawyers had not adequately represented the interests of academic authors when negotiating the proposed settlement, the court brushed aside concerns about adequacy of representation when the case went back into litigation, despite an academic author submission that challenged class certification because of inadequacies in the plaintiffs’ representation of academic author interests. These concerns should have been taken seriously because academic authors make up a substantial proportion of the class that the District Court certified; most of the books that Google scanned from major research library collections were written by academics. Academic authors overall greatly outnumber generalist authors such as the named plaintiffs.

Posted by stevehit with 1 comment to pep.biblio oa.new on Mon Nov 19 2012 at 18:31 UTC | info | related