Via James Grimmelmann, the Washington Legal Foundation, a group known for its defense of property rights, filed an objection to the Google book deal earlier this month focusing on concerns related to those I raised in my posts earlier this week.

WLF points out that the Supreme Court has mandated that plaintiffs seeking to certify a class must make a diligent effort to notify all affected class members. According to the high court’s Shutts decision, this effort must include—at a minimum—sending a letter to every identifiable member of the class. In this case, this would mean sending a letter to every address in the US Copyright Office’s database of authors. WLF questions whether this was done; the foundation reports that it never received notification related to any of the books for which it holds the copyrights.

Now, it might be objected that this process would be prohibitively expensive. But if the class is so large that it’s impractical to notify all of its members, then the class is certainly too large to expect a judge to verify that the interests of all class members is being served by the settlement. If the class is too large to notify, then it’s too large to certify.

WLF also points out that the sprawling and heterogeneous class of plaintiffs makes it unlikely that the plaintiffs’ lawyers can fairly represent all parties who would be bound by the settlement:

For example, only those class members whose works have already been copied by Google are entitled to cash payments under the Settlement Agreement. Thus, the financial interests of those whose works have been copied diverge from the interests of class members whose works have not been copied. The former have an interest in maximizing cash payments, while the latter would prefer to see a smaller portion of the settlement pot allocated to those cash payments and a larger portion allocated to compensation for copying to be performed by Google in the future.

Another distinction among class members involves orphan works – that is, works whose owners are difficult (if not impossible) to ascertain. The owners of orphan works (who may not even know that they hold any ownership interests) have an obvious interest in ensuring that a large portion of settlement funds is dedicated to identifying the ownership of orphan works. On the other hand, the owners of works whose ownership is readily identifiable have an interest in holding down such search costs. If less money is devoted to such search efforts, a correspondingly greater percentage of settlement funds will be available to provide compensation
to them.

The point here isn’t that the amount allocated to orphan works searches is too high (or too low), or that more (or less) should be allocated to pay for previously-scanned books. The point is that a settlement involving millions of plaintiffs will inevitably enrich some plaintiffs at the expense of others. This isn’t a problem that can be solved by changing the details of the settlement. It’s a problem that can only be solved by limiting the scope of the settlement to parties whose interests are actually represented by the plaintiffs’ attorneys.