I attended a Google Book Search settlement workshop yesterday hosted by the National Writer’s Union (NWU), the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The workshop’s panel included representatives of those organizations as well as an agent, a professor who has been studying the issue, and the executive director of the Authors Guild, which is one of the primary parties involved in the settlement. Here are the main themes from the event.

 

“A settlement isn’t the right way to settle this.”

New York Law School Associate Professor James Grimmelmann, who remained a largely non-partisan outside observer (although he has stated he thinks the settlement should be approved, with modifications), pointed out that a class-action lawsuit isn’t the right way to determine an issue like fair use under copyright law. It needs to be addressed by the government and not through private negotiations, he said, because it has huge societal implications.

Grimmelmann also pointed out that if the settlement goes through, it’s likely Google will emerge with a huge market advantage over any potential competitors, which may negatively impact any healthy competition in the marketplace.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild and a lawyer, argued that the risk of losing the lawsuit was too great: if the courts found Google’s scanning to fall under fair use–as Grimmelman and at least one other legal expert think it could–then others would copy Google’s scanning project. “In our view,” he told the hostile crowd, “It would be catastropic.”

Grimmelman responded that the proposed settlement wasn’t the only valid solution, and that there could have been other paths to a compromise.

 

“The settlement is overreaching, and probably untenable.”

Lynn Chu, an attorney, author, and book agent, was the most vocal opponent of the settlement, calling it an “outrageously bad deal as a financial matter” for writers and a “typical entertainment industry scam.” At one point she implied that the Authors Guild had been misled by incompetent legal counsel, which not surprisingly seemed to anger Aiken.

Chu pointed out that the business model proposed by the settlement has nothing to do with the original lawsuit, which was solely about fair use. “You glued a business contract to a waiver,” she told Aiken, and accused the Authors Guild of appointing itself as an agent to the world’s authors.

She also criticized the proposed Book Rights Registry, which is sort of an ASCAP for authors appearing in Google Book Search, noting that it would help Google shift costs over to authors by forcing authors to take care of administrative and publishing tasks on their own dime.

“[The settlement] probably won’t survive an appeal,” she told the crowd, a sentiment that Grimmelmann seemed to agree with. Still, she cautioned, “There’s no reason to be apathetic.”

 

“The settlement isn’t really author-friendly at its core.”

Edward Hasbrouck of the NWU pointed out a worst-case scenario that could happen to an author under the terms of the settlement: You have a book included in the database, but your ex-publisher claims that because it has authorized a print-on-demand version of the book it still owns the rights, so you and the publisher agree to binding arbitration and you lose. Since the arbitration is legally enforceable, you will have permanently lost your claim of ownership over the digital copy in Google’s database.

Chu noted that Google reserves the right to audit the Book Rights Registry, but that the favor isn’t returned because Google claims trade secrets will be compromised. She also noted that authors can make their own deals with Google and don’t need to rely on the settlement.

Note: the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America hosted an online panel discussion this morning. You can read through it at http://sfwa.org/online-google-settlement-panel/.

Last week, the BBC Radio 4 program Open Book focused on the role of the editor in publishing a work. Host Mariella Frostrup interviewed five editors or author-editor combos about what value an editor–whose job didn’t really formally exist until after World War II–provides.

You can listen to the half-hour show here; the first 10 minutes alone are worth it just to hear Diana Athill talk about the unique editing requirements of Updike, Naipul, and Rhys. But here’s a summary of key points from the full episode:

• An editor can help shore up a writer’s weaknesses. Some writers may be masters of language, but need help shaping something into a finished work. Other writers may be great writers but lousy at taking care of other essential life tasks, so they would otherwise never write or publish without someone’s help.
• An editor is a guaranteed, and perhaps the only, extremely attentive reader a writer will have. Diana Athill says, “What one learns when you’re working with an eidtor, is that actually very few peole get their books read extremely attentively by anybody. A writer is dying to have his or her work read with complete attention. And here is this editor person, and the one thing they have done is they have paid full attention to your work, which is very gratifying.”
• An editor may act more like an agent or a music producer. Some editors will work closely with writers to help them determine career steps, going so far as to advise on what sort of book to write next. Others, like Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish, will manipulate the original manuscript so much that their role becomes something more collaborative, or even borderline Svengali-like, as with music producers.

Open Book for Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 [BBC]
(Photo: Nic’s events)

Thomas K. wrote, “Is there any chance you just might find a picture good enough for our kindle of Jane Austen?”

Here’s a larger version of Poe, looking sufficiently melancholy. Probably thinking of what rhymes with sepulchre or something like that.

A reader asked me about a Poe screensaver, so I decided to make one. My god, he looks gloomy. That’s Poe for ya.