A judge's decision to certify a class of authors in the lawsuit over Google's effort to build a massive online library has been vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The circuit said Monday that Judge Denny Chin's decision to certify the class was premature because he had not determined the merits of Google's fair-use defense under the Copyright Act to copying and displaying "snippets" of millions of books for the Library Project of its "Google Books" search tool.