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Wait, they found him again!

How does this hurt them on books where there is no audio version available?

It hurts them a lot. The authors only made money three or four times for the work they did once, and this read it out loud feature is preventing them from being paid yet again for the same work done long ago.

Apologies in advance for the flame, and even more so to the authors who disagree with the guild and I unfairly lump in with them...

But the fact they offer no product to compete with it is beside the point. Authors in the guild have stated time and time again that it is their god given right to control their works and get payments multiple times over for one job.

The fact they can't sit back and make more money by not creating new product doesn't occur to them as being their fault, they just see it as someone else stealing money from their pockets.

That is why they sued Google for making their books searchable followed by wanting to shut down the public library system, and why they sued Amazon for selling used books and not giving the authors money again and again and again for one sale of one book.

While this certainly isn't the stance of ALL authors, it most definitely is the stance of the loudest ones, which happen to be the ones that pack together in this guild to cry about how not making new product is causing them to starve out on the streets and how no one will ever write again if money isn't involved, since clearly no one writes for the enjoyment of it.

The greedy bastards in the guild would rather see all literature in the world no longer exist than to see someone else profit off 'their' work, despite the provisions in copyright law that (admittedly that everyone is forced into using nowadays) state the work belongs to the public domain in exchange for that copyright protection for a limited time.

I've been thinking about this problem for a dog's age, from the perspective of a fiction writer. "Seed" For Sale Get your wallets out! Christmas is coming!

Now you can see there's gonna be an issue with this, like you just raised, which is: what if nobody knows who the copyright owner is anymore? Maybe the publisher went out of business, and we're not sure what business now owns the assets. Maybe the author died and didn't leave a will and now grandkids in six states own the copyright and don't know about it. -- link

That kind of clears up what orphan books are, but still, if no one knows who owns the rights, who are the people complaining?

So far the only "crap" that I have spouted is that the Writers Guild and other defendants don't have the authority to cut a deal of this nature. Far from being "uninformed", I read this opinion in this interview with Professor James Grimmelmann, of New York Law School.

The option should be left open for the publishers to negotiate similar deals with other services in the future.

No, the option should be left open for another party (e.g. Internet Archive, Amazon, etc.) to compete with Google under the same terms. Also having a hard cut-off publishing date (Jan 5th 2009) for books that can be covered by this deal. In 50 years, you will only be able to get 50-year-old books from Google Books. They'll have to break the law again in order to get sued and make another class action settlement in order to update their service. The deal is a stupid one - nice idea, but it needs to be fixed. Here's a suggestion from Professor James Grimmelmann, of New York Law School:

My settlement would start from this one. It would have maybe the same basic economic outline. It would be completely non-exclusive, so that other people could assume Google's various payment and security obligations and do the same thing it did. It would have provisions that protect privacy, that protect reader's first sale and fair use rights, that protect library's rights, it would have anti-trust oversight of the Registry in it, and it would have a more accountable Registry that was really operating in the interests of readers and society and was being watched carefully rather than just having a few author and publisher people running it.

Interview with Grimmelmann

If you guys really want to understand all of this stuff, as I did, I suggest you listen to my interview with Professor James Grimmelmann, who is writing a long, long, long brief examining all the issues for the court about this settlement in an amicus brief from the New York Law School.

He went to Harvard and Yale, interned for the Creative Commons, and used to be a programmer at Microsoft.

It's a lengthy interview, but we cover all the important stuff.

http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=356&mode=one

Within this blog entry the following assertion was made:

So, because Probst is a publisher and has an Amazon Advantage account, he sent Amazon a letter saying "whafa" and he got this in response:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage"

So! Probst was wrong! He WAS being persecuted!

This begs several questions. Is the above email genuine? If genuine, was the statement valid or was it an honest misstatement by a customer service person. If the quoted text is true, does Amazon in fact have a policy of excluding items that it considers porn, and was it this policy that was hacked?

I the policy does exist, isn't it much more likely that Amazon was modifying this policy and there was some sort of error in the code, or perhaps a over active coder introduced the feature.

I clicked on the link about hackers claiming credit for the Amazon hack expecting to find to find a professional web site about computer security.

Instead, I got a bizarrely colored and (hopefully) satirical blog containing articles titled "Amazon is a Gay-Hating Company for Nazis".

That'll teach me for trying to RTFA.

I clicked on the link about hackers claiming credit for the Amazon hack expecting to find to find a professional web site about computer security.

Instead, I got a bizarrely colored and (hopefully) satirical blog containing articles titled "Amazon is a Gay-Hating Company for Nazis".

That'll teach me for trying to RTFA.

The article submitter (Miracle Jones) just posted a good article on this here.

The DS is a horrible, clunky interim device, but it is definitely closer to what I'd like to see than the Kindle or the Sony Ereader. I've penned a lengthy essay on the matter over at The Fiction Circus: The Dream You Hold: Four Metaphors for Books, Offered as Aid to the New Electronic Bookbinders You guys should read it and tell me what you think. What I am missing and what I've got right.

The DS is a horrible, clunky interim device, but it is definitely closer to what I'd like to see than the Kindle or the Sony Ereader. I've penned a lengthy essay on the matter over at The Fiction Circus: The Dream You Hold: Four Metaphors for Books, Offered as Aid to the New Electronic Bookbinders You guys should read it and tell me what you think. What I am missing and what I've got right.