Google/ Authors Guild Settlement Affects Artists
on February 1st, 2009I am very sorry that I cannot find the correspondence that brought this to my attention, so please contact me again so I can credit you.
The Google/ Authors Guild case concerns Google’s attempt to scan all books and post them to the internet without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder. While Google claims this act is their do-no-evil public service as internet uber-librarians, Google stood to earn millions of dollars from the exploitation of these works and had no intent to provide the creators or publishers of same with one penny from the use. While Google claims that only a small portion of any of the books is available for public perusal at any time, this is de facto copyright violation for commercial use.
When I have found these books scanned online via Google, huge sections of the books were available for use by the reader. Nifty for research purposes, but crappy of Google to take advantage of the content provider (author). Google’s empire made some 6 billion dollars last year alone.
(EDIT)While this article, which is written by someone who is clearly unhappy with the settlement, claims Google only made “snippets” of works available. I was able to read 20 pages of copyrighted texts at a time. Basically, entire chapters.
One commenter demanded to know had ANY of the annoyed authors ever made any money on their books after the advance?
Why, yes. I have. Thanks for asking. That’s how I have made almost every penny I have ever made on A Distant Soil.
The Authors Guild settlement will, supposedly, make a portion of the advertising funds raked in by Google payable to authors. How that is all going to work out remains a bit murky.
Further confusing the matter, children’s book illustrations are treated differently under the settlement terms than other book illustrations, which are excluded from the settlement.
This is the correspondence that recently came in the email, directed at all parties who registered to receive info about the claim and settlement outlined here.
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