The Petition Letter to the Judge of the Google Book Settlement will be submitted to Judge Chin on January 26th, 2010, with the names of the 365 authors who signed it with me.
I am proud to be in their company.
It’s no longer possible to sign the petition. But you are welcome to join the discussion of the Google Settlement and related issues here.
– UKL
Other posts on the Google Settlement discussion can be found by searching on “Google Settlement.”
Ursula K. Le Guin is a founding member of Book View Cafe.
Slashdot published a link to this petition linked to Ms LeGuin’s web site! http://tiny.cc/UfDRj
Thank you, Ursula!
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It’s a pity that there was not more time to collect signatures, as the process seemed to be rolling along nicely rather than tailing off drastically. I suspect there are many more places writers would have virally heard about the petititon if there had been more time.
As for some of the vitriol on Slashdot:
This points out that we, as writers, need to continually educate the non-writing public that writing is a real profession, that requires hard work (and often significant financial investment), that deserves real pay, and that writers need that pay for housing, groceries, and medical care. Just like everyone else.
Google’s PR has whipped up a public totally ignorant of the profressional writing and publishing process to see (a) writing as a mere hobby, so we seldom earn and never need much money anyway, and (b) Google as Robin Hood, stealing works away from all those greedy writers just to generously give them away to the “deserving” public. That is exactly the same public attitude that promotes non-corporate piracy too.
Google has an incredibly slick and devious PR machine. We writers have to collectively create our own to counter it.
I do a lot of this, but am not sure I have the energy to do it on Slashdot right now. I’ve been spending a lot of time over these past few weeks trying to make writers aware of the Google Settlement and the January 28 deadline, and not getting much paying work done.
I didn’t read all the garbage on Slashdot, but noticed elsewhere that Ms. Le Guin tends to get criticized just for being of an older generation. I’m merely middle-aged, but I get those criticisms too. I’m told I’m just not technologically hip. I am technologically hip, but I still need to pay my bills.
I’m a reader, and I want my name added, specifically as a reader. I dabble a bit in writing, but I read, a lot. My husband, even more so. I agree with your position.
Yolanda Kozak
Canada
I just wanted to point up that the type of people who comment on Slashdot, especially the ones commenting on that crosspost, in no way reflect the average person out there. They are not representative of most readers, they are not representative of educators, and they are only representative of a very peculiar, entitled minority that for some bizarre reason believes it should be the business arbiter for a) corporations holding copyrights (i.e. Disney – you know TRADEMARK is kind of a big deal too), b) what writers should say, when and where – and not shy about making threats, either; and c) ability to control and republish for free.
There is not one “average” or normal person who would ever DREAM of making these types of statements about an author or their work and payment. They would never go online and announce baldly that people should have the right to read whatever, whenever, for free – like not even have to pay the library for the book they checked out and lost or just kept and never returned. People absolutely are paying normal, ordinary prices for books via the Kindle and other eBook readers. They are not going into the process with the assumption that just because pixels can be easily copied and sent out “for free” then it should be free.
They are not “normal,” and they should not be having any bigger seat at the table than they deserve, which isn’t a very big one, because they don’t buy many books, and I don’t think anything will ever convince them to buy books in any amount, either. They also want to watch movies for free and listen to music for free too. However, I don’t notice recent films or musical releases “not earning any money.”
I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way. As there is with all types of writing, there are some things that are less-appealing to us than others. I don’t much enjoy the sort of SF that seems to revolve around issues that I find non-dramatic, or that has a certain “feel” about it that wasn’t ever in any world that ever was, or probably ever will be – even with parallel universes or ‘branes.
So, for your delectation, straight from the fan hearts of love, I give you the 1983 Hugo award-winning story “Melancholy Elephants,” and this puppy is a drama fest all about . . . copyright.
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
Spider loves it, so did the Hugo voters, and let’s not forget, seems to me, there’s about THREE HUNDRED of them. If you get my meaning.
Thank you for all your work on this petition. It is a shame that so few understand copyright and its importance to artists regardless of their medium.
This petition reminds me of the time in the last 1940′s when James C. Petrillo, leader of Musician’s Local 502 in New York took his members out on strike in opposition to recording.
“You will play at your own funeral,” was the slogan that won the hearts and minds of his members.
In the event, recording proved to be the salvation of musicians, providing more work, with greater job security at higher pay than they ever got before electronics impacted their field.
Petrillo could see the loss of revenue at the concert hall door, but not the impact of musak, recordings for radio and television, or the vast concert venues filled with fans who bought the records and then went to see the performers live.
You are caught in the same mind set. Google books will be the salvation of writers. Isn’t it weird to find writers organizing against affordable and widespread
access to their works? Hello out there! Wake up and smell the 21st century.
The Google Settlement sets Google up as a publisher of e-books and print-on-demand books, for Google to SELL. Any publisher can publish print-on-demand books and e-books. So can any writer whose copyrights have reverted. Furthermore, a lot of them ARE publishing e-books and/or print-on-demand books. Why should they give a very large cut of their sales to Google? And why should they let Google sell ads next to the book pages, for which Google gets the ENTIRE revenues? The Settlement doesn’t give the writers or their publishers a penny from those ad sales.
If Google had a really attractive contract, they could advertise it up the wazoo–they certainly have the means–and copyright holders could voluntarily opt in. There are good reasons why Google thinks their own deal is not attractive.
The AAP publishers involved in negotiating the Settlement also think its terms are unattractive. They are binding everyone else by the terms–but not themselves. They had a clause put in the Settlement allowing them to cut private deals with Google, and the industry buzz is that most of them already have those deals in place.
Where, exactly, are the “missed opportunties” here?
Amy,
I see my readers pirate stuff all the time. They will give endless arguments on e-lists as to why it’s OK, which all boil down to they think their one little piracy will cause no harm, or that they won’t get prosecuted it.
The Google issue just makes even more ordinary people think it’s OK to pirate.
Joshua Leinsdorf states: “This petition reminds me of the time in the last 1940’s when James C. Petrillo, leader of Musician’s Local 502 in New York took his members out on strike in opposition to recording.
“You will play at your own funeral,” was the slogan that won the hearts and minds of his members.
In the event, recording proved to be the salvation of musicians, providing more work, with greater job security at higher pay than they ever got before electronics impacted their field.
Petrillo could see the loss of revenue at the concert hall door, but not the impact of musak, recordings for radio and television, or the vast concert venues filled with fans who bought the records and then went to see the performers live.
You are caught in the same mind set. Google books will be the salvation of writers. Isn’t it weird to find writers organizing against affordable and widespread
access to their works? Hello out there! Wake up and smell the 21st century.”
HOWEVER, what he fails to make mention of is the facts that James C. Petrillo, was not protesting the ideal of what the recording ideal was. he was protesting the initial way the recording industry was taking as it’s approach. Had not James C. Petrillo protested, Musicians today would not have had as much protection as they do, as much as that has been eroded away over the last two decades. Even then in the recoding industry, musicians can choose not to publish under a record label. They can choose to publish their own works, and not be forced to terms of any record label. Musicians can still write and perform their work, and choose to never make a record or license their work to anybody for reproduction. instead performing their works only as live performances at venues. Google’s offer is one that will allow them the right to publish any work of any author without the authors permission or consent. Google does not even offer an opt in or opt out term. all they want is the right to take any authors work and publish it and make money. Not even the record industry does that, although had James C. Petrillo not protested, they might have gone exactly that way.
I sell a line of graphic tee shirts. I designed all the art work, logos and sayings. I make the screens and silk screen them myself. I sell my shirts for a minimum of $25-$30 per shirt. Several times I have caught my designs on places like cafe press, Zazzle and a couple of other online press on demand sites. I have had to fight some of them over my copyrights and trademarks. They sell my designs on shirts for $10-$15 per shirt. If I sign up to use their service, I would lose revenue. They sell for half as much as I currently sell for. So why should I sign up? i actually lose money. Googles current settlement offer is much the same way. Authors would be losing money. Google would be paying them less than they currently contract for, if paying them at all.
Googles current offer and settlement should be opposed. It does not protect the authors, any author. It doe snot really benefit any author, and it totally infringes on the work of all authors.
I would suggest that Joshua Leinsdorf, learn the entire subject matter before he starts to make analogies between two different things. He should not misrepresent and misstate things, as he did with the recording industry of which I am a member of. I even get to vote on the Grammy’s.
Author, Musician/BMI/RIAA, Poet, Artist. Graphical Designer. Actor/SAG/FAG/BAFTRA/Equity.
Please include my name – I’m not a published author but am working toward that goal. This is outrageous and I support your stand.
Roy,
Also, if Joshua means that as-yet-undeveloped technologies based on books could result in large profits, he’s correct. BUT, the Settlement gives absolutely none of the profits from as-yet-undeveloped technologies to copyright holders.
Thank you, Ursula and everyone. I was too late to sign the petition but would be happy to have my name added to any “P.S.” list that may one day be composed. I am just now finishing my opt-out letter, and it was such a pleasure to use that “deal with the devil, as it were” line as punctuation.
I found out about the petition too late but would like to add my name as an author. I hope the petition can be expanded for the fairness hearing in February. If so, please include my name.
I am very grateful to Ursula Le Guin and heartily thank her for her courage and vision.
New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann is maintaining a blog on the Google Settlement.
http://laboratorium.net/
Today he posted links to a number of documents filed with the court. The SFWA/ASJA/NWU brief mentions Ursula LeGuin’s petition. This, the brief submitted by Arlo Guthrie, and the pro-se brief written by writer Diana Kimpton, are of particular interest in that they focus specifically on how the Settlement affects writers.
However, all the documents he links to are quite readable.
The notion that copyright owners will have to “defend their right against every careless or predatory use of the material” is a deliberate distortion that’s sadly typical of the hyperbole surrounding this case. The opt-out procedure should certainly be made as simple as possible, but it represents an critical element in the effort to preserve our cultural legacy and defend it from abandonment.
Charles King:
Google is publishing works.
Google is claiming that hunting down the owners of orphaned works is too difficult. Mind you, Google claims to put the world of information at your fingertips.
Every book published in the US has an ISBN. These can be tracked to the copyright office. I can do this. You can do this. Anyone can do this.
Except Google. It’s ‘too hard’.
Google isn’t doing this out of the goodness of its heart. It’s doing it to make money. Just like any other publisher does. It makes advertising revenues off of those ads. it keeps all of it, none of that money goes to the copyright holder.
I hereby propose the following text:
“This eBook is copyright by Author Y. It is explicitly exempt from the Google Class Action Settlement.
If you have found the text of this book published by Google with advertising next to it, understand that Google, by displaying this text, has agreed to the following terms:
The rate of pay for this document is one share of Google’s public stock per time it shows up on Google Analytics search queries.
Google has the right to opt out of this agreement at any time by paying all back payments due for this publication arrangement and removing it from their archives.”
…because if Google can demand an opt-out, so bloody well can we.
Charles,
The notion that the Settlement is all about “orphan works” is just Google PR. The Settlement applies to every book published in the US, the UK, Canada, or Australia before January 5, 2009. It controls the copyrights to all those books for the rest of the copyright term. Numerous foreign publishers and authors’ groups are objecting to the court that many of these works were written by citizens of other countries that were theoretically withdrawn from the Settlement.
Google has so far paid little attention to opt-outs. They have certainly, from what I’ve heard from other authors, digitized many books “opted out of the Library scanning project, which Google reassuringly allowed soon after the Author’s Guild suit was filed. The American Psychological Association alone has filed a complaint with the court saying they sent Google a list of over 1,100 works not to scan. Google had scanned 950 of them before August 9, 2009.
The French publishers who filed a brief, are rightly complaining that Google refuses to make public a list of the scanned books, while requiring authors to opt in or opt out of the Settlement. Google told the French group they could not supply a list because the “metadata was owned by third parties.” Google refused to tell me personally whether my own books had been scanned unless I FIRST opted into the Settlement. They said this was “for fear of false claims.”
UK author Diana Kimpton wrote a letter to the court, in which she said she somehow got access to the Google database. Her searches revealed that bestselling books such as _The Da Vinci Code_ were listed in the database as “out of print.” This is extremely important: That Settlement says that designation entitles Google to sell the book, and authors who opt in have no legal recourse for harm caused by Google’s competition with their in-print book except an arbitration board controlled by Google.
The Google database also changes constantly as Google scans not only different works submitted by libraries, but the same work every time it is submitted. Copyright holders have the full burden of constantly policing the database for not only the status of scanned books but of all their “inserts”–every short story, essay, etc. they’ve ever had published in a book. Authors with only modest output (who opted in) have filed complaints with the court that they have had to police hundreds of entries so far.
Not only are opt-outs counter to copyright, Google us either paying no attention to them, or paying no attention to maintaining appropriate records.
Thanks for including me as a supporter – I’m still in some sort of shock at finding myself included (even on the periphery) amongst such luminaries as Keri Hulme!
The sentence that got me nodding my head in agreement:
“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.”
FWIW, I’m reminded of some comments of Michael Moorcock’s in the preface/foreword or whatever he calls it, in his Millenium reprint series, about a series of books that had influenced him, where the series’ authors got very little in either payment or control of their own works. He didn’t sound impressed.
Again, FWLIW, that same argument, that the originators of specific works have the right to the most say in their use of it, is one of the reasons I’m a supporter of the Free and Open Source Software. I’m shocked that Google sees fit to do a Microsoft at this point.
Publishers Weekly has just published an interview with Ursula Le Guin regarding the petition. See:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6717077.html
I might want to sign onto the Google deal. Then again, I might not.
The thing that bugs me is that my book, published by a university press, is there — for free with no contract at all for me.
It’s like Google is saying, “Look what we can do: We can make your traditional means of income irrelevant. Now, if you just sign here….”
What can I do to get them to take my book down while I — or my kids — figure out what’s best?
On behalf of all aspiring writers, I would like to thank Ursula K. Le Guin for standing up for authors’ rights.
Young writers should be considered, here. What Google proposes is nothing less than robbing people of the ability to make a living from writing, thus taking a dream I’ve held since I was a little boy and crushing it before its reality can begin.
In my twenties, I presently can sell everything I write–just not to pro markets. I keep practising, striving, yearning, selling fiction for peanuts. Luckily, I’m as fast as a young Silverberg, so I make enough money to survive on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, tap water, and the occassional piece of fruit. Why do this to myself? Because I NEED to be a writer. I would rather die than be anything else.
If Google robs me of this dream, I don’t know how I’ll live. I’ll find another way, I suppose, but it will be quiet, pathetic life, and one I’ll always deem a failure.
I’m not successful enough to fight with you. Not yet. Not as I’d like to. Indeed, I’m mouthing off in a forum full of personal heroes. I will merely sit at my desk, writing everyday, as Isak Dinesen said, without hope and without despair. But while my fingers are busy I’ll keep my toes crossed for you, because if Google succeeds in their strikingly evil ambition of robbing humankind of literature, then no matter what happens with my dream of writing, I’ll still need a crummy part time job.
See you at a future worldcon, or perhaps next time one of you visits McDonald’s, depending on how this goes, because I have no other lucrative skills, nor do I want any. I said I’m fast, but I’m nowhere near as good as an old Silverberg, yet. Let’s see what happens. In the meantime, I’m here to tell Ursula K. Le Guin that she’s a hero. On behalf of all aspiring writers, I salute you.
Yours eventually,
Wm. Luke Everest
Thank you Ursula. The argument that “information wants to be free” is ludicrous. If true, then so does food, and carpentry, and so does legal service, and internet access. “Google wants its raw material for free” is much closer to the truth.
If Ford wanted their steel for free they would invent the same gobbledygook Google’s lawyers are using. And we would laugh in their face. This Court should do the same.
Three cheers for Judge Denny Chin
http://www.archive.org/details/UsDistrictCourtNyDecisionAuthorsGuildV.Google
“The question presented is whether the ASA is fair, adequate, and reasonable. I conclude that it is not.”