Slow day Friday: only four new filings.
- Abilene Christian University supports the settlement. Their position is primarily as a consumer of books:
While interlibrary loan reduces the inequalities among libraries, there is a financial cost as well as a delay for scholars requesting the work, with no guarantee that an individual book will even be useful to their research. Thus, the settlement is a significant change for the better by creating a means for us to offer immediate electronic access to crucial published resources. [JG: Note that they want to rely on the Institutional Subscription to replace ILL; whereas UW-Madison pointed to print-on-demand as the ILL-killer.]
Arthur Ramous is staying in the settlement, but has comments (in a letter cc:ed to Barack Obama and Arne Duncan). Since “Google now becomes Keeper of the Knowledge … I would like to suggest that Google transmit the Google book data base electronically to the copyright office or to some other designated governmental office on a regular basis, say semi-annually or annually.”
Author Virginia Aronson objects via letter, complaining primarily to the poor royalties authors have been receiving. She writes, “Talk to almost any professional writer and you will hear the same sordid tales of unpaid and underreported earnings, remaindered titles, and copyright infringement.” She says that the settlement “will make writing books an act of masochism, guaranteeing that authors will never be paid for their time and effort,” though she doesn’t elaborate on how the settlement is worse than the raw deal authors are currently getting.
Author Erika Mailman objects via letter as well. She regards Google as “an interloper who had nothing to do with the writing of my books, nor the publishing of them.” She’s furious that Google’s share of the money will be larger than authors’. She also sees the settlement as undermining both e-books and the library system.