A good one on the Google Books outrage today in The Washington Post by the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle, headlined "A Book Grab by Google":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/18/AR2009051802637.html

Freelance journalists are fortunate that the Google settlement controversy exploded just as our settlement was reaching the Supreme Court on unrelated grounds. Google is getting hammered ... by competitors, by public-access guardians, by infringed authors. Any way you look at it, it's bad news.

The Google settlement and the Freelance settlement (Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick) are different in the sense that the latter involves no royalty registry and, arguably, no de facto monopoly. But one of the plaintiff players, the Authors Guild and its sellout lawyer, is the same, and so is the illegal process of binding absent class members by default to an ambitious global settlement that unilaterally widens the scope of what originally was a simple piece of litigation to redress past damages. Don't let anyone try to peddle the idea that the two cases have nothing to do with each other.