'Google Books Settlement Has Bombed in New Haven' (at Beyond Chron)

"The gut says the Google Books class-action settlement – negotiated by the Association of American Publishers in conjunction with the Authors Guild – is doomed. Too many moving parts, running too much roughshod over existing law. But I don’t come to this conclusion from the perspective of a Central Casting new-tech basher. Something very important for the future of authors is going on here, and Google obviously will be a big part of that. It’s just that a preemptive sellout settlement by an organization speciously claiming to represent the interests of the global community of writers cannot be allowed to define that something."

So begins my piece today at Beyond Chron, the San Francisco online newspaper, headlined "The Google Books Settlement Has Bombed in New Haven." The link is http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Google_Books_Settlement_Has_Bombed_in_New_Haven_6857.html.

The essay was being published just as news came that a federal judge has rejected the Internet Archive's motion to intervene in the Google settlement. The Internet Archive is still free to file objections.

Irv Muchnick