Le Guin accuses Authors Guild of 'deal with the devil'

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

I'm just pointing out, if copyright hadn't been stretched out ridiculously, there would be no problem with "orphan" works, and no real economic window for Google to be trying to exploit.

Incorrect.

If you had a period of 75 or even 50 years, you'd still have orphaned and out-of-print works. There might be fewer of them, but they'd still be there.

Besides, Google's violations are not limited to orphan or OOP works. The problem is that Google scanned millions of books and started using them for commercial purposes without getting the permissions of the rights-holders, including ones who they were capable of locating.

Google is basically saying: "We don't care what your contracts say, we don't care what your royalty rates are supposed to be, we don't care what your opinion is of electronic publication, we don't care about any nation's copyright laws. We have the right to convert any author's books into electronic form and sell access to them at rates that we set." Any publisher who did this would get thoroughly sued and/or reamed.

I would be fine with some method of putting orphaned works into public domain -- if it was done properly, i.e. via legislation, with safeguards in the event that the rights-holder does resurface. The revised settlement is a bit better, but it's still not done properly.

I'm with LeGuinn on this one; Google stepped way over the line, and the Guild caved. The proper solution should be for authors to opt-in to the Google book scanning project, and if the author cannot be found, the results should be modified by legislation rather than lawsuits.

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Same at the 19th century books, the 18th century books, and older, if it weren't for Project Gutenberg.....

Right, but those are public domain - if the media companies get their way in the USA, there won't be any new public domain work there going forward.