Slashdot Mirror
"Authors Guild" Skims Half of Google Book-Rights Settlement
Miracle Jones writes "A recent memo from the 'Author's Guild' to the writers and publishers that it supposedly represents shows that only $45 million of the $125 million dollar settlement with Google will be paid to writers, and that the most a writer can receive for a book is $300. Many people speculate that Google's monopoly over all of out-of-copyright works will result in a brutal monopoly that will hurt both writers and readers, and that the 'Author's Guild' had no right to make the deal in the first place. How will it all shake down? Should writers be paid at all for their work? Will Google be any good at the publishing racket?"
Full details (minus the blogspam and reactionary hyperbole) are available here.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This 'Author's Guild' makes a lot of noise like they represent the majority of writers. But do they really? Do they have any "official" standing with anyone? Any "big names" on board with them? Or are they just a bunch of hot air with an important sounding name? Who are they really?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...or would that require responsible editing?
I don't even see how this is possible. If a work isn't copyright, then anyone can publish it without paying royalties. I'm not sure how a company can make a business off of that alone, or how that can be construed to be a "monopoly." This is simply put, an article solely put out there to rile readers.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
I'm glad we had libraries before copyright lawyers. If someone suggested the concept of a library today as a new idea, it would be shot down instantly.
The writers should get whatever their contract with the guilds says, not a penny more.
Hey, you get into bed with a dying business model, the people running will eventually go after you,.
And yes, I think Google should have fought it tooth and nail, because they have the money to do so.
Plus the long term benefits of having this finally hashed out in courts would be a money and time saver later on.
Bu not fighting it that are costing themselves a lot of money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am a writer and this settelment, far from being perfect, falls within the realm of consideratoin and for that reason, and that reason alone, it is really up to authors not unlike myself to say weather this is a good or a bad deal. For me, I'd say I am in concordance with this settelment, for as it on the one hand provides leverage to Google et al, it does indeed provide an mechanism for compensation to authors here and fro.
Perhaps the compensation is not enough. Some will say that. But in the end, that is between the Author and his or her publisher as to what represents fair compence. For me, I say: this is a fair value. If in the future, this is found to be to burdensome, perhaps the guild will have to reopen the contract for another round of negotiation. And their is nothing wrong with that, for that is the American way.
"Should writers be paid at all for their work?"
Some rhetorical questions should not even be asked. This is one of them.
en tea
Should writers be paid at all for their work?
Not for out of copyright works. If you've been dead for seventy years you can do without the money.
Not for discussing Google as a monopoly provider of out of copyright works anybody is allowed to copy either, for that matter.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Miracle Jones - what part of "out of copyright" do you not understand?
Idiot.
No wonder publishing is going down the crapper, stodgy companies unable to adapt and whiny prima donna authors thinking everything that flows from their pen is manna from heaven.
I'm not saying there isn't worthwhile stuff out there, it's just in the extreme minority these days.
Why is the term "out-of-copyright" being used instead of "public domain"?
When a copyrighted work's copyright expires, it goes into the public domain, which means there are no restrictions upon the work at all.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Slashdot in a nutshell.
You're an imbecile, Rob.
This isn't about "out of copyright" works. It's about works that are still under copyright, but out of print. Google effectively just bought the rights to all out of print books.
Here's the Author's Guild description of the deal. Authors can opt out, but only have until May 9 to do so.
These are the actual terms:
The settlement, if Court-approved, will authorize Google to scan in-copyright Books and Inserts in the United States, and maintain an electronic database of Books. For out-of-print Books and, if permitted by Rightsholders of in-print Books, Google will be able to sell access to individual Books and institutional subscriptions to the database, place advertisements on any page dedicated to a Book, and make other commercial uses of Books. At any time, Rightsholders can change instructions to Google regarding any of those uses. Through a Book Rights Registry ("Registry") established by the settlement, Google will pay Rightsholders 63% of all revenues from these uses.
This is about copyrighted works.
Google is paying authors for the right to show segments of their works as the result of searches. This is free money and free advertising for authors, and something for which a strong case can be made for fair use.
Beyond this, Google is agreeing authors over 60% of proceeds from subscriptions. This is a FAR higher percentage than authors get from book publishers.
Any author may choose to opt out. Of course.
Google may end up with a monopoly on out of print books. But I personally prefer that to the option we've been living with for the last several thousand years, where you couldn't reliably get out of print books.
The first reply makes it quite clear that Google cannot have a "monopoly" over anything free. Paying for it unnecessarily and voluntarily was a kind gesture on Google's part.
If Google is to be lambasted for "only" paying up to $300 per work, then what's to be said of Project Gutenburg, which has been giving away text of out of copyright books for years, and has paid the authors absolutely nothing?
What's to be made of it all is TFA is a misguided, biased to the point of fictionalizing of details, underhanded attempt to foist tinfoil hat quality editorializing on /. in the guise of news. Had the MafIAA attempted to collect on out-of-copyright works, they'd be laughed out of court and rightfully humiliated in the press. That's the kind of treatment TFA deserves.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The Google case *does* relate to full texts, *and* to whether an author should be paid the price of their choosing for their work.
Basically, Google was able to settle a class action lawsuit in such a way that it was given rights to works from all members of a class (including the right to sell access to full texts for out of print books). So basically, unless you've taken action to exclude yourself from the class's deal, Google can sell almost anything you've ever written that is not currently in print, without any permission from you or your agents.
Google has used brilliant legal tricks and some paltry millions to more or less turn the copyright system from opt-in to opt-out when it comes to selling on Google Books.
I personally suspect that this will be a net win for everyone involved, Google, readers, and writers. But it would be wrong to downplay the importance of this case, and the potential impact of it's settlement.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
And since when is 45/125=.5?
36%, not 50%; quite a big difference. Sensationalist, indeed.
49 20 61 72 65 20 6E 65 72 64 2E
This must be one of the most self-serving organizations on the planet. Why on Earth anyone would want to join them is beyond me. Their annual dues BEGIN at 90 dollars a year and are adjusted on a sliding scale for an author's writing income(!) In exchange, what do they provide? A quarterly newsletter, "discount" health, legal and web services, and, uh, oh yes, they will work very hard to sue anyone attempting to promote your writing, like Google, Amazon, etc.
Just how do they recruit members? Do they send trench-coated representatives in the middle of the night to your house and make you an offer you can't refuse? Do they even have any members? Who is bankrolling these nutballs?
I smell a scam. It smells a lot like lawyers looking for work...
How can you have a monopoly on out-of-copyright books?
Everywhere, I see "Author's Guild" in quotes. As a relative of an author, I happen to know that the proper union is the Writer's Guild of America, West" (WGAW). Does this "Author's Guild" really speak for the authors its claiming to represent?
When was the last time any trade union/group represented its members?
seems to be that google decided that it was easier to pay off the writer's guild to prevent them from filing a meritless suit against google for using out-of-copyright materials. I don't consider google the enemy here, I think it's retarded that they had to bribe someone to prevent them from engaging in meritless litigation against them. At least they didn't have to pay a lot for it. Though probably this was the best way for Google to go when it all comes down to it, in today's screwed up legal world.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The publishing industry worked very well when the only way you could self-publish was with expensive long offset runs. Nowadays, print on demand is making self-publishing much easier and more affordable. Add to it affordable typesetting/design software, and you have a chance to really crack these cartels.
I recently published my book via a POD publisher (Booksurge). You can see it at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439223084/
I also do micro-runs for wholesale (100 copies of the book at a time).
Interestingly.... I did the entire book design, including the cover, in LaTeX. It came out great. I am extremely happy with the quality that the free software in this area is able to provide. The only few issues are design mistakes I made, and not software limitations (the barcode should be placed differently on the back, etc).
My most recent journal entry includes a follow-up post on advice for people designing books using LaTeX.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That should be "out-of-print," not "out-of-copyright." NOW everybody go nuts and tell me how terrible I am. --Jones
Moral: authors (unless you are established) just can't win. Makes you wonder why we bother.
My web domain.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you aren't a professional writer, or at least not a professional writer of fiction.
Here's the thing. Putting aside the ridiculous assumption that you have a right to the product of someone else's creative efforts by virtue of being born, people gotta eat, right? So let's say that music is free to whoever wants it, and anyone can play it or listen to it whenever with no consideration to the creator of the work. Now, the only people making money from music are the people who are playing it. That's fine, as far as it goes; songwriters would either learn an instrument or go in to a different line of work. You can project how this would affect music but the bottom line is that musicians could still make money.
An author only makes money when someone pays for their work. An author only makes money when someone pays for their work. Read that one more time, just to get it firmly in your head. Essayists and authors of short stories are usually freelance, and novelists have to commit a serious length of time and effort to put out one saleable work. Even if you get rid of freelancing somehow and just rely on staff writers (which would result in lower-quality, monolithic work) there's no such thing as a "staff novelist". And it's a little silly to suggest that authors should only be paid for reading their books to live audiences. So, the only time an author makes a profit, or a return on the investment of time and effort he/she has made, is when they sell the rights to a publisher or copies to readers (if they self-publish). Take that away, and no one will write works of any real length. Why? Because they can't afford to spend 3 months writing a book for which they will receive little or no money with which to support themselves, and it takes a damn long time to write a novel if you've got to work a full-time day job.
There's also the issue of justice. My work does not, I repeat, does not belong to all humanity. Humanity has never in its long and illustrious history written a damn thing. Saying that a particular work of art belongs to "humanity" as opposed to the artist who made it makes about as much sense as saying that your car belongs to humanity. And, as for the right to alter a work and claim it as your own, how would you feel if you built a house and then someone slapped a coat of paint on it, sold it, and kept the profits? Besides, authors are perfectly welcome to release works for free. How many good novels have you seen written by modern, living authors for free?
You talk about "we" and "society" and "humanity" giving up rights to the creative works of individuals as if "society" even has some sort of rights in that regard. By your logic, "society" has the right to anyone and everyone's labor, unless you believe that art, music and literature are somehow inferior to other kinds of work. You talk about authors making their works "less accessible and less useful to society" as if authors have some sort of occupational responsibility above and beyond that of any other career. For one thing, it's a little like accusing shop owners with burglar alarms of making their goods less accessible and useful to society. For another, our country isn't and has never been about people having a responsibility to make themselves useful to society. Assuming we're talking about the US, we're based around the idea that individuals have the right to do whatever they want to as a profession (assuming it's legal) and make whatever money they can doing it. Maybe you're thinking of a command economy, like a communist or socialist system, both of which aren't exactly renowned for their tendencies to develop great works of art, or even decent works of art for that matter.
This was a bit of a tirade, but I'm a writer (as yet unpublished), as are several of my friends, and if you were to suggest to any of us that you had some sort of right to the stories we've spent hours, days, weeks or months writing, rewriting and generally trying to cobble in to the best shape possible after racking our brains for inspiration that might or might not come, it's even money as to whether you'd get laughed out of the room or carried out on a stretcher. And we've all got day jobs.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
How does Google protect a monopoly on that content without copyright preventing competitors from copying it and distributing it?
--
make install -not war
The authors tend to be dead and it's their grandchildren receiving this extra money.
Whenever a Disney property is headed towards copyright expiration, the copyright term gets extended anyway.
...copyleft, not copycentre.
Let's not put aside that notion.
As someone who was once born, I have a right to Shakespeare's "King Lear". I can't coerce someone into printing me a book with the play printed in it to take with no compensation. But if I buy that book, I can perform the play, recite it in public (for a fee, if anyone will pay me). I could even put my name on it and sell it to a magazine for publication, if that magazine would pay me. I have the right to quote as much as I want in my own different story. I can rewrite it in modern English, or slang. I can write my own story about a king driving themself mad that's exactly like "King Lear". My birthright as a person is to inherit my folk culture and use it as I please, without anyone retaining the right to stop me (short of some clear and present danger of violence or something like that).
Writers share that birthright, of course. Without it, they'd have no cultural context to write their own "original" works. I quote "original" because practically all works, especially the most popular, derive closely from previous works. Our culture assigns value to new work that refers to the old work embedded in the culture. Without the old work, and free use of it, practically none of the new work would be even recognizable as valuable at all.
Yes, people gotta eat. The protection of copyright for some "opportunity window" like the original Constitutional 14 years, within which your monopoly should protect the "promotion of science and the useful arts". Or, if you double your investment, or maybe tenfold (so artists living above the poverty line can live well on the profits while they produce another work), your monopoly expires earlier. But copyrights that preserve the monopoly for every work to protect the maximum profit forever, excluding the works from the culture, are not at all a good compromise with free expression of people for their own culture.
People gotta eat. But people also need our own folk culture. After "pop" becomes "folk" (fairly quickly, about a human generation later), most of the value in the work is being contributed by the people perpetuating it. Copyright has a long way (smaller) to go to properly reflect those essential values.
--
make install -not war
I saw a brilliant argument last year, to the effect of: The copyright system (or even the entire IP system) is an imperfect approximation of "compensate creators for the value of their content". There's nothing special about "copying", per se; if nobody wanted to read your book, then nobody would want to copy it either.
But copying, until recently, was a useful proxy for "obtaining value". It's like a toll road. You're not paying for the value of "pass through this gated entrance"; you're paying for the entire value of the road. The entrance is just a convenient place to meter it.
Plain-paper Xerography changed the model; now individuals could copy works without much effort. And the digital world completely overturned it; works are copied in the course of using them, and there's no realistic way to prevent "unauthorized" copying. Which, really, is fine, because again: Copyright is only about copying because copying was a useful proxy.
What it really means: "We need a new way to compensate creators".
Wish I could find the article; it said it so much better.
I've been a published author of computer books for almost 15 years, writing 12 books for several major publishers. All of my books have been scanned and put online by Google without my consent.
The first I heard of the Author's Guild was when Google sent me a notice about this matter and offered me practically nothing for the 'right' to steal my books. I do not have a contract with the Authors Guild and did not give the Author's Guild any right to speak for me. I'd imagine most authors didn't authorize them, either.
This item, and the post to which it links, are utterly false. It really doesn't belong here.
Not one penny from the settlement (or from Google, or from anyone else) will go to the Authors Guild. I was involved in the two years of negotiations with Google, on the authors side, and I can tell you this as a simple matter of fact. But don't take my word for it; there are no secrets here. All the documentation is publicly available.
So Google negotiated this deal with a guild that was the authorized, legal representative of all these writers, and it, and by extension, they, negotiated this crappy deal?
Unless Google bribed someone, there's nothing illegal about it. Mismanagement on the part of the writers' guild, perhaps, but nothing illegal.
As for monopoly, so what? None of these books were in print. Nobody wanted them. Nobody else, including Microsoft, had the moxie to do this scanning project. There is no monopoly in the classic sense.
It's like saying a single drug store in a tiny little town has a monopoly when, in fact, the town can barely even justify the one, and that only with hard work from the druggist.
Issues to be addressed:
1. Did the guild scam the writers somehow? Who was deciding it should proceed as it did? "Follow the money" should do the trick here.
That is all. Nothing wrong by Amazon. No "monopoly" in any kind of meaningful sense -- nobody wanted those books, much less use them in a online-scan project. And, barring fraud in #1, nothing wrong by the guild or the writers. Stupidity, perhaps. Say "awwwww" when you go to bed tonight, I guess.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Actually, the economics of bookstores is not what you suggest.
Bookstores actually have one of the lowest markups in the industry (they buy books at 60% of what they sell them at-- most other businesses are about 50%). Let me explain how this works when I run a micro-run (100 copies) of my book (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439223084/) by sales channels.
The micro-run of 100 copies costs me $3.84 per book including shipping to get it to me. I assume the printer makes a little bit there too. So suppose the actual cost is probably closer to $2 regarding base production (no royalties at all in these calculations).
The list price for the book is $15.99. As you will see, this does not allow for a normal distribution chain with many steps. Let's look at how it works depending on where I sell it. If I sell a copy retail, that gives me $12.15 profit per book.
If I sell it to a bookstore, I would sell it at 9.59 per copy. This means I make $5.85 per book in this case (close to my royalties when Booksurge sells a copy through Amazon, which are $5.60).
If I sell copies to a distributor, though, I have to sell it at 40% of list, or $6.39. This would mean I would get $2.55 per book. The distributor only gets about $3 per book too. It is still a lot more than Booksurge pays me when they sell through distributors (I get $1.60 per book there).
So what you generally see is 40% of the list price gets used in production, author royalties, and publisher profits. 20% goes to the distributor, and 40% goes to the bookstore.
In just about every other business, the retail store ends up making 50% of their sale price which can go to operational expenses, etc. For book sales, it is only 40%.
However, as an author, my sense is that the ways the bookstores look at mitigating their risk make sense only in limited cases. For example, most want to do consignment. I will ONLY do consignment if I get prime placement because I don't get any more from consignment than I do from wholesale sales.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
From a writers perspective, one of the most satisfying aspects of writing is the permanency of putting words to paper. Generations of people will have the opportunity to enjoy your story. It is, in a sense, a little bit of immortality.
Unfortunately, this is all dependent of the availability of your works. At some point in time, a decline in readership limits the revenue a publisher can realize from further print runs of the work. The work eventually falls by the wayside, and is not really available to the public anymore. Aside from the obvious understandable financial goals of Google, I see them simply trying to keep those books available to the public, and future generations. And, yes, I read TFA.
Were things handled equitably? I do not think so. Allow me to explain.
The agreement made with the Author's Guild, by Google, completely leaves the original author out of the loop of negotiation, and thus the legacy of their work. A limited form of reimbursement, a one-time $300 "settlement" serves nobody but Google (well, the Author's Guild DOES make out like Bandits here).
This settlement, I believe, also stains the credibility of Google in the long run. If they plan on future ventures like this, the people with whom they will be dealing will be far less likely to see any altruistic motivation in Google's plans. They had the opportunity to make a huge impression on a lot of people here, and they failed to take advantage of it. I honestly believe there IS some altruism, on Google's part, involved with this case. But for some reason, possibly something as simple as greed, they squandered that opportunity.
They could have done things totally different, and achieved the goals of everyone involved.
Here is how I would have proposed a deal, to the original authors and the Author's guild.
Initially, NO money changes hands. A list of works is assembled, and the actual authors are determined. Both Google and the Author's guild make an honest, diligent attempt to contact the author of each work. If they are not able to be contacted, they are then put in into a category, possibly labeled "dormant". All other authors are contacted and informed of the process of which I am about to explain, and offered an "opt-in". The authors that "opt-in" are then categorized as "Participants", while the ones that do not "opt-in", are are categorized as "non-participants". None of that default "opt-in" bullshit here either. Keep it clean.
So, now we have all the works, categorized into three groups. From here, each group is interacted with differently, by Google.
Lets get the Non-Participants out of the way first, since they will not be discussed further.
Quite simply, Google doesn't make their works available. They receive no compensation from anyone, Google, or the Authors Guild. Their works continue to languish as they have in the past. The authors of these works gain nothing from the process, nor lose anything. The song remains the same, so to speak.
Now, lets discuss the Participants.
Since the authors have been contacted, they are offered a deal with Google, and their decision to "opt-in" is their agreement to the terms that Google and the Author's Guild have made in advance.
Here is how it works.
Google makes the work available, in its entirety(no derivative works), as they see fit, but in accordance with the "opt-in" agreement. Any funds derived from the publishing of the work are divided 3 ways, with proportions agreed to at "opt-in" time. A portion for Google is set aside, say, 80%, a portion for the author is set in a interest bearing trust (19%), and a smaller (the remaining 1%) amount is is set in trust for the Author's Guild.
The portion set aside for Google is theirs to do with as they see fit.
The portion set aside for the Author's Guild is available to them for overhead costs, basically to be used as they see fit.
The portion set in trust for the author is accessible on the second day of each month, and can be cleaned out, by the auth
First singers, now you, writers? How do singers profit from their work? Performers? Software writers? You're all in the same boat- what do you do now that your works can be consumed in a nonphysical mediums? You withhold at point at sale. Once your works get into the wild, some script kiddie is free to distribute them. So what do you do? There's support and there's initial release runs of the physical product, plenty of which people are willing to buy. Eventually we'll probably just revert to a patronage style system where rich people pay for their favorite writers. It's not like it'll be any different from now, you still won't be able to make a living wage, spend the most of your life at the bottom of society...etcetc.. Exactly who has benefitted from this inane copyright system anyway in it's present form? Bigwig publishers and managers, all of which, are not you. You authors are still poor. Chances are you'll get MORE money with temporary copyright and direct distribution.
Hence copyright terms are supposed to be for "limited times" and we have other things such as fair use.
There is absolutely no reason to support someone's great-grandchildren into their retirement on residual royalties.
I think that copyright terms should be dropped to something like 30-50 years tops. life+100 years is absolutely rediculous.
See, copyright is essentially a transaction between the creator of a work and the society at large. Because these are two parties to the dynamic, they both have interests and rights involved.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If I walk into a bookstore every day for a month and spend 30 minutes reading your books, is that stealing?
How is this fundamentally different from what Google is doing here?
As an author as well, my biggest frustration with Google Books is how long it takes them to get the books up. It might be copyright infringement in the letter of the law, but it is no more stealing than if I borrow your book from a friend to read it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
lets you read the whole book, even when it is under copyright. (By default, Google Books now lets you read 20%.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think it is easy for people to forget here how different the software and book worlds are in terms of how copyright works.
For example, I pushed hard to get the LedgerSMB manual licensed under a BSD license rather than a share-alike one in the spirit of the GPL. The major reason is that an aggregate work which might include this in a book as a separate (and referenced) work would actually make it harder for us to distribute (and eventually make money off) such manuals in the future.
Repeat after me: Books are not software. Books are not software. Books are not software......
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
65% royalties on electronic distribution of out of print works? That is quite a bit more than they get for printed works sold in a book store....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
There is a big fucking difference between "out of print" and "out of copyright".
You people who just spent your time arguing as though this settlement related to out of copyright materials rather than out of print materials really, really need to pay more attention.
The big conflicts between "Intellectual Property" (sorry, 25c in the swear box) and the free software movements don't seem to be about the basic principle of copyright, but rather:
The GPL would be on a bit of a sticky wicket without copyright - there would be nothing to stop people keeping the source code secret - although I guess if RMS was made official supreme ruler of the universe he could not only abolish copyright but mandate that all source code had to be made public. We'd probably see disabled single grandmothers being dragged off to jail plaintively crying "but I included the URL for the SourceForge page..." :-)
But seriously folks - you can object to the current "IP madness" without rejecting the basic premise of copyright...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Let's make copyright equal to the term of the natural life of the author. When an author dies, the works become public domain immediately. Deal?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
We have now established that the total worth of all out-of-print, but in-copyright books in the USA is US$ 125 million.
Or as Tigger said of Santa "I always though he would be taller"
The resurrection of all these out-of-print books is made possible by a surge in print-on-demand publishers like Lulu. (There are many.) Using high-volume lasers and robo binders a pdf can be hosted and then used to print a book as a one-off economically. When somebody orders it only then does it get printed. This technology and business model stands on its head the old print-5000-and-pray business model of publishing that is about half a millennium old.
FYI: It costs about 15 dollars a month to host a pdf on a print-on-demand firm's servers. There is of course fulfillment each time a book gets posted, but up-front costs are minimal -- editing and layout excepted. Some authors are skipping New York altogether and cutting to the chase with POD. (Read: Profit.) Disclaimer. I have no connection to the print-on-demand industry. But I have looked into it for my book since my New York agent died. The inconsiderate bastard.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
And I know that I would not be where I am without the public domain.
The image for the cover of my book came from a digitized 17th century manuscript, courtesy of wikipedia, for example.
A great deal of my discussion did center around translations of rune poems I used with the translator's permission (in exchange for advertising his work). I looked at public domain versions but decided I didn't like them. (In the second edition, I will be doing my own translations, not for reasons of copyright but because I want to make some minor contributions to the area.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The article, frankly, seemed to be out in lala land, so I'm going to put it out to the general populance of slashdot: if your book is out of print, how can you still make money from it? Are you making lots of cash from residuals from online databases?
If you can't make much money from it or even if you can, doesn't this Google project offer you the chance of making a lot more money? Yes, the Author's Guild's skimming seems excessive, but at least they managed to put together a comprehensive deal to streamline copyright issues.
Now, if there's a whole source of money that I've missed, I withdraw my argument. But this seems like a good thing for out of print books, right?
PLEASE read the settlement or some of the other comments before you post..... GOOGLE reserves the right to reproduce any OUT OF PRINT books including those still under copyright
"The settlement, if Court-approved, will authorize Google to scan in-copyright Books and Inserts in the United States, and maintain an electronic database of Books. For out-of-print Books and, if permitted by Rightsholders of in-print Books, Google will be able to sell access to individual Books and institutional subscriptions to the database, place advertisements on any page dedicated to a Book, and make other commercial uses of Books. At any time, Rightsholders can change instructions to Google regarding any of those uses. Through a Book Rights Registry ("Registry") established by the settlement, Google will pay Rightsholders 63% of all revenues from these uses."
This settlement if approved will allow Google to reproduce out-of-print COPYRIGHTED work and use it for any commercial venture they see fit without informing the RIGHTSHOLDERS.....