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"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.
...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
You must have a really good editor.
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
I am a writer and this settelment, far from being perfect, falls within the realm of consideratoin
With such mastery of the English language, $300 must seem like quite a nice chunk of change for your work...
Perhaps the compensation is not enough.
Not enough for what, exactly? Allowing your works to receive the single most effective form of free advertising ever devised by humanity?
In Google's position, I would have just blacklisted all guildmember's works from search results until they paid me for sending them sales. It amazes me that anyone still has the 'nads to complain about their work appearing on Google... Such petulance strikes me as similar to a man who complains about winning the lottery because of the increased taxes. Boo-frickin'-hoo.
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
And yet it really does get to the heart of the matter. What IS copyright, anyway? It started off as a bargain between the people of our country and the writers and artists who entertain, enlighten, and educate us: Create these works, and we'll respect your control over them (as a way to earn a living from your work) for some number of years, but ultimately they belong and will revert to all of humanity.
As a society we've been more than generous over the last century. No creative artist living today will EVER have to lose control over his work by simply living too long. (Ill-advised contracts notwithstanding) That is a tremendous gift, and as a result we as a society have allowed vast amounts of our culture to remain under the control of individuals and corporations, for the first time in human history. Think about that. For thousands of years, if you heard a story that you liked, or a song you liked, you would have been perfectly free to retell (or rewrite!) it as you saw fit, or sing it to a friend or audience, altering as you alone saw fit. We as a society have largely given up these rights, and are giving them up for longer and longer. In exchange we think we're getting better creative works (even though almost any writer will freely admit that he's no Shakespeare, who didn't enjoy nearly the control that we give today's writers)
And so it seems to me that with society giving up more and more rights to authors, and authors doing their best to make their works less accessible and less useful to society, it's not such a bad thing to start re-asking fundamental questions like "Should writers be paid at all for their work?"
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.
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
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!
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.
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'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.
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
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
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