Twenty-four hours after first reading Lynn Chu’s op-ed in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on the proposed Google book settlement, it’s still on my mind. I have not been following this issue as closely as I should be, and no doubt there are counter-arguments. But her analysis certainly disturbed me. Here are some key passages:
There is nothing more individual in the world than a book, an author, a publisher, and the value of a contract. The aging baby boomers now flacking the settlement don’t seem to understand that PDF scanning (how Google and everyone else digitizes books) isn’t rocket science; it’s cheap and easy. Books will be digitized without Google. But the Google settlement sets in amber today’s overhyped role of the Internet, ruled by that great and magnificent Oz — Google.
And:
Under the settlement, every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote — and every excerpt permission ever granted to others — at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs. This is a massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in effect, Google’s data-entry slaves. Indeed, in most cases such information about every permission ever granted is unlocatable. It opens a Pandora’s box of disputes and mistaken claims about who actually owns what.
And:
We already have a good system. It’s called the system of private property and free contract, designed for dispersed, autonomous individuals — not command-and-control centers. The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out — just for Google.
Ms. Chu is a literary agent at Writers Representatives, and she clearly believes Google is being evil with this proposed settlement of its dispute with the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs in their class-action suit against the company. I hope that the 385 pages of the settlement document don’t scare others in the publishing world away from understanding it before the May 9 deadline for deciding whether to opt-in or opt-out.
Here’s a link to the WSJ article (though, as a subscriber, I’m not sure whether or not it’s behind a firewall).
Ms. Chu continues her argument, advising writers to do nothing, here.