Ursula Le Guin's Petition Against Google Books

Miracle Jones blogs about the petition against the Google Book Settlement created by science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, winner of five Hugo awards and six Nebulas. Le Guin is urging professional writers who are opposed to the terms of the settlement to sign her online petition before the January 28th deadline. From the petition: "The free and open dissemination of information and of literature, as it exists in our Public Libraries, can and should exist in the electronic media. All authors hope for that. But we cannot have free and open dissemination of information and literature unless the use of written material continues to be controlled by those who write it or own legitimate right in it. We urge our government and our courts to allow no corporation to circumvent copyright law or dictate the terms of that control."

Comments

Re:Which corporations does Le Guin mean?

[RDW]

Le Guin does not in fact support the 'Disney model', e.g. here:

http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Copyright.html

she describes the Sonny Bono act as "the recent excessive extension of copyright term by the U.S.A, which has imperilled the international copyright system". She just doesn't want to be screwed over by Google in a land grab deal negotiated by an 'Authors Guild' that doesn't represent her.

Re:Which corporations does Le Guin mean?

[Bigjeff5]

As per the Bern Convention, French copyright law doesn't apply in America, the French are simply afforded the same copy protections as a US citizen would have when there is a case of infringement of a Frenchman's work in America, and vice versa and for all signatories of the Bern convention. There are minimums set in the Bern convention, but they were in line with what US copyright law already stated at the time, and they were nowhere near the roughly 140 year terms we have now.

US Copyright law was never significantly altered because of the Bern Convention except to extend the copyright protections to non-citizens (specifically, citizens of signatory countries).

The reason we have the outrageous copyright extensions is because large corporations (Disney being the most adamant) lobbied like hell for them. They were never instated based on another country's laws except as an argument for them. It was more like Disney saying "Look, the French do it, why can't we?" and dumbasses in congress actually listening to them.