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William Morris Endevor agency and Authors Guild butt heads on Google book settlement
August 18, 2009 | 2:04 pm
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By Paul Biba
From today’s Publisher’s Weekly:
After the William Morris Endeavor agency issued a letter to clients last week advising them to opt out of the Google settlement, the agency has issued a second letter reasserting its position and detailing it further. In the newest letter, WME states that the Authors Guild, in defending the settlement (which it helped to iron out), fails to "adequately address" the issue that writers, by remaining in, "waive, again for the term of copyright, their right to have Google remove their work from its database if they haven’t done so within twenty-seven months from the Notice Commencement Date."
Claiming that most publishers won’t be making either "in print" or "out of print" books available for sale through the settlement, WME says that the Guild wrongfully asserts that terms of the settlement won’t affect an author’s ability to renegotiate with Google and that the search giant is making worrisome steps towards a monopoly. "We believe that the license being given to Google to publish and display with impunity out-of-print ‘orphan’ works (where the rights owner is unknown and estimated by the Financial Times to be between 2.8 and 5 million books out of 32 million books protected by copyright in the United States) will open the door to establishing Google as the most comprehensive database, potentially a monopoly, with unfair bargaining power." …
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Comments:
Bravo William Morris!
In their two letters, it does an excellent job explaining why the Google Book settlement is so fraught with uncertainties and difficulties for authors that for most of them opting out is the only viable option. And never forget that not formally opting via a Google webpage out means a forced opt-in for almost all authors of copyrighted books published anywhere in the world come September 4. Act now or regret it.
I’ve begun to wonder why the Author’s Guild seems so willing to take the heat for defending controversial aspects of settlement rather than leaving that to Google. I’ve talked to some of the Guild’s representatives and they seem to mean well. The great bulk of the problem elements were put in at Google’s insistence. Unlike the Guild, they have the money to litigate this dispute practically forever. But why defend what you don’t like and even initially opposed?
The answer may lie in Wikipedia’s description of the Stockholm Syndrome:
“The Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological shift that occurs to captives when they are threatened gravely but shown acts of kindness by their captors. They tend to sympathize with their captors and think of them highly because they believe that their captors are showing favor because of their inherent kindness and thus might not be as bad as they look. Unfortunately, they fail to recognize that their captors are making choices based on their own discretion. When subjected to these situations for a period of time, the captive develops a strong bond with the captor.”
Not everyone agrees with the Authors Guild “settlement” “agreement”. See http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/guild-responds-to-second-wme-letter-on.html
I’m an Authors Guild member who — like many others, I’m sure — finds himself in a “David vs. Googleiath” situation.