Nine months after U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin’s March 22, 2011 decision rejecting the terms of a proposed class action settlement,¹ there are renewed signs of life in the litigation brought against Google by a broad class of authors, publishers and related associations over the Google Books Library Project, Google’s plan to construct a huge digital library.

Two weeks ago, The Authors Guild and several authors filed a motion to certify a class defined as

[a]ll 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, who are either (a) natural persons who are authors of such Books or (b) natural persons, family trusts or sole proprietorships who are heirs, successors in interest or assigns of such authors. “Books” means each full-length book published in the United States in the English language and registered with the United States Copyright Office within three months after its first publication.

(See, e.g., the Dec. 12, 2011 motion for class certification and accompanying brief.)  As Publishers Weekly has observed, the publishers and the Association of American Publishers – who informed Judge Chin in September that they had “made good progress toward a settlement that would resolve the pending litigation regarding the Google Library Project” – did not participate in this motion.

And last Thursday, Google filed a motion to dismiss the associational plaintiffs in both the Authors Guild suit and the American Society of Media Photographers class action.  In its supporting brief, Google argues that copyright infringement lawsuits must be filed by copyright holders themselves, and that associations claiming to represent them (including The Authors Guild and The American Society of Media Photographers) lack standing because they do not own copyrights themselves and do not meet the test for associational standing.  (Ars Technica has an interesting discussion of the Google motion.)

Stay tuned for further developments . . . .

¹In his March 22 decision, Judge Chin (sitting by designation in the Southern District of New York) concluded that the Amended Settlement Agreement would

grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners . . . [and] give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.