The Authors Guild blog has an interesting piece looking at Amazon’s growth in light of a decline in antitrust enforcement. For background, it brings up the Bloomberg Businessweek story I covered the other day, it moves on to excerpt a piece in Harpers by Barry Lynn that compares Amazon to the current state of other monopolized markets, such as the chicken-raising industry: Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in...

Ars Technica has a look at the current filings and legal strategies in the Google Books case. There are three current cases against Google—two 2005 cases involving publishers and authors, which are the ones involved in the settlement that failed after four years of work, and one in 2010 from photographers and illustrators. Google appears close to a separate settlement in the publishers’ case. But Google is likely to carry on its battle with the authors, photographers, and other individual copyright holders. Some authors consider the fight a matter of principle. And even if Google convinced...

A new Beyond the Book podcast (#265) from the Copyright Clearance Center. Here’s the Blurb From the BTB Web Page: From the perspective of copyright, 2011 has been a year like so many others in the Digital Age. Suits and counter-suits over copyrighted text, music, film and video continue to fly in and out of court. The long-standing “Google Books” case is, for now, scheduled for trial in 2012, while the HathiTrust— a consortium of university libraries — has drawn a new lawsuit from authors for announcing plans to post online copyrighted texts that may or may not be “orphan works.” A panel of IP experts...

Google is not the only party in the Google Books lawsuits who is attempting to move forward with litigation. Publishers Weekly reports that the Authors Guild is filing to request class certification in its lawsuit against Google Books. The guild argues the class should be approved because individual claimants “could not as a practical matter effectively assert alone against Google” such claims of infringement, and that “those claims are presented far more fairly and efficiently than they would be in individual actions, which would require the same issues to be litigated multiple times.” ...

Apparently Google has gotten fed up over the failure of the settlement talks in the copyright lawsuits over Google Books, because it has begun to move toward actually litigating the case. An article in TechWorld notes Google has notified Judge Denny Chin that it plans to file a motion to ask that parts of the 2005 copyright infringement lawsuit and a related 2010 lawsuit be dismissed. [Judge Chin] set a deadline of Dec. 23 for Google to file the dismissal motions. The plaintiffs will have until Jan. 23 to respond to the motions, and Google...

A few days ago we reposted the Authors Guild’s screed against Amazon Prime’s Kindle lending program, in which Prime subscribers can download one free e-book per month to a Kindle device. For publishers who did not sign on to take part in the program, Amazon actually buys the copy of the book that the subscribers download each time it is checked out. The “Big Six” publishers are exempt from this program, because the agency pricing agreements restrict Amazon from doing that sort of thing to their books—but since Amazon doesn’t have those agreements with any publishers except the...

That's the title of an article on the Authors Guild website: Are any of the books in Amazon’s new e-book subscription/lending program properly there? Earlier this month, Amazon launched its Kindle Online Lending Library as a perk for its best group of customers, the millions who’ve paid $79 per year to join Amazon Prime and get free delivery of their Amazon purchases. Under the Lending Library program, Amazon Prime members are allowed to download for free onto their Kindles any of more than 5,000 books. Customers are limited to one book per...

Here is the full press release (blockquotes omitted).  Makes interesting reading: The U.K. Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, the Norwegian Nonfiction Writers and Translators Association, the Swedish Writers Union, The Writers’ Union of Canada, and four individual authors are among the new plaintiffs in an amended complaint filed today in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust.  Individual authors joining the lawsuit include University of Oslo professor Helge Rønning, Swedish novelist Erik Grundström, and American novelist J. R. Salamanca. The Authors League Fund, a 94-year-old organization supported by Authors Guild...

I’ve found a couple of more points of view on the HathiTrust lawsuit over the last couple of days, and given that they are diametrically opposed it seems like a good idea to present them together for contrast. First, SF and fantasy novelist Elizabeth Moon strongly opposes the use that the universities and HathiTrust are making of scanned works. Moon is up in arms over HathiTrust’s plans to allow unlimited free download of “orphaned” works from the trust (though she seems to be under the impression that it would allow download of all works, not just the orphaned ones)....

In a series of blog posts yesterday whose tone can only be described as “gleeful,” the Authors Guild has been showing that specific books aren’t orphans. So far, they’ve found copyright owners or literary agents for J.R. Salamanca’s The Lost Country, Albert Bandura’s Adolescent Aggression, and James Gould Cozzens’s Confusion. They didn’t track down Walter Lippmann’s The Communist World and Ours, but it appears that someone else did. The legwork involved wasn’t particularly intensive: some Google searches, some queries of standard copyright-related databases, and some phone calls. This would be a dog-bites-man story,...

From the Authors Guild blog: Yesterday, we began an effort to dig in more deeply to the HathiTrust list of “orphan works” candidates. These two jump out as a bit too easy. Wikipedia does the heavy lifting in re-uniting an “orphan” with the first author. According to the site, “Albert Bandura is widely described as the greatest living psychologist.”  He’s the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. The Stanford Daily wrote about him in March.  The HathiTrust orphan work candidate is his 1959 book, co-authored with Richard H. Walters, “Adolescent...

From the Authors Guild blog.  This is important stuff: About two minutes of googling turned up a professor emeritus of one of the HathiTrust “orphan works” candidates.  He lives in suburban Maryland.  His second book sold a reported one million copies, and he’s listed in IMDb (two of his books were turned into movies: one starred Elvis Presley, the other Warren Beatty). He has a literary agent, and he signed an e-book contract earlier this month. No, we’re not making this up. Just before we filed our lawsuit, we did some cursory research into some of...