“And if you’re an author, you have no way to make money from your work if it’s out of print.”

Nonsense.

Google is far from the only game in town. In fact, those authors who have most strongly opposed the settlement proposal have been those who are the strongest believers in electronic distribution.

These authors are already pursuing the increasingly-competitive market opportunities to distribute their “out of print” books electronically: through authors’ own websites, through direct sales of PDF’s, or through licensing to e-book distributors. Time and again, we heard from them at events for writers about the settlement.

For these writers, the settlement would mean not a new market or new revenue (under the settlement’s definitions and allocations, most revenue would go to print publishers, regardless of who owns the electronic rights under current contracts), but new, artificially created competition for their rights and revenues from Google and print publishers, structurally privileged by the settlement.

At best, it would mean a complex new bureaucratic process for writers to claim their existing rights against the inevitable, if unfounded, counterclaims by publishers to control of electronic rights and revenues. At worse, it could mean loss of their rights in “one-strike-your-out” arbitration.

Google errs in lumping together authors and print publishers as having “forgotten” their books. An author no more forgets their books than a mother her children, unless the books really deserve to disappear from view.

It’s (print) publishers, not authors, who have abandoned “out of print” books. It’s publishers who went to court (unsuccessfully) in Random House v. Rosetta Books to try to stop writers from making books that publishers were no longer printing available to the public again as e-books.

If I were the copyright holder of the first piece written, I’d be suing the author of the second piece for infringement.

BUT, as I understand it, it is not illegal to reprint a press release, and even rework it and put your name on it. For example, publishers’ press releases announcing new books are very commonly reworked a little (if at all) and then published as “book reviews.” I’ve been told this is because press releases have an “implied license” for reprinting: Certainly, that’s what the businesses who send out press releases desire and expect.

I suspect that is what happened here: Google sent out a press release, or at least gave this journalist suggested copy, and he used it.

Drummond:

And the rights holders will remain in control. The reality is that they can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether.

Authors of so-called ‘inserts’ cannot set the prices for their works - they won’t get paid for them. Nor can they ‘withdraw them from Google Books altogether.’ They have very little control (as I detailed in my paper on inserts).

Authors of books who wake up after March 9, 2012 and discover they have been opted in to this injurious settlement will also be unable to ‘withdraw them from Google Books altogether.’

David Drummond is a Senior Vice President at Google and its chief legal officer.

So I guess the Q is, did Drummond decide to copy Brin’s choice phrases, or did Brin copy Drummond’s choice phrases? I’m just supposing it’s the former due to the timing, but I guess it could be the latter — after all, Drummond is a lawyer and Brin is an engineer! ;-)

Third possibility: both Brin and Drummond were working from a set of talking points written by the Google PR division. Variation on third possibility: the Google PR division placed two versions of the same column, one in the NYT under Brin’s name, the other in the Guardian under Drummond’s, either not knowing or not caring that they were pretty much the same column.

Those of us who create the copyright works that Google is hell-bent on exploiting understand that originality and intellectual honesty are the essence of good writing. Drummond or Brin (whoever plagiarised whom) clearly does not. This may help to explain why Google has made such a hash of the GBS - the proponents of the scheme do not understand books. They appear to believe that the transcendent power of the written word to change the course of history can be extracted from the printed page by any philistine with a scanner and a good search engine.

You’re right, Gillian. A rude surprise indeed.

Drummond: And the rights holders will remain in control. The reality is that they can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether.

I rather doubt both Mr. Drummond and Mr. Brin on this point. As I’ve noted before, the “opt out” language on the settlement page implies that Google may one day simply override what an author chooses.

Their lips keep saying yes, yes!

But the written word says, maybe no.

“…If you checked the box on the Opt Out form requesting that Google not digitize books that you identified the Settlement Administrator will pass along your request to Google. Although Google has no obligation under the settlement to comply with such request, Google has advised the Settlement Administrator that its current policy is to voluntarily honor such requests and refrain from digitizing your books or, if they have already been digitized, refrain from displaying them…”

Hilarious, great find and even better presentation.

It appears that Brin used Google Buzz to draft his op-ed. Perhaps Drummond was one of his contacts?

Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of the two?