The firm served as lead counsel for Google Inc., in defending copyright infringement lawsuits brought by the Author’s Guild, et al., and separately by McGraw-Hill and four other large New York publishers in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleged that Google’s “Book Search” project (involving the scanning of books in the libraries at Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, The New York Public Library and Oxford University) infringes the copyrights of millions of authors and publishers. The litigation has been described as the most important copyright dispute in the last 50 years. A potential settlement that will allow Google to continue to work with its library partners to scan public domain and in-copyright books from their collections is being considered by the court.

The Authors Guild v. Google Inc., No. 1:05-cv-08136 (S.D.N.Y. filed Sept. 20, 2005).