I've been thinking about this problem for a dog's age, from the perspective of a fiction writer. "Seed" For Sale Get your wallets out! Christmas is coming!

Better headline -- "Scribd Will Let Writers Sell DRM-Free Documents"

The English language is literally a riot.

If you guys really want to understand all of this stuff, as I did, I suggest you listen to my interview with Professor James Grimmelmann, who is writing a long, long, long brief examining all the issues for the court about this settlement in an amicus brief from the New York Law School.

He went to Harvard and Yale, interned for the Creative Commons, and used to be a programmer at Microsoft.

It's a lengthy interview, but we cover all the important stuff.

http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=356&mode=one

You are awesomely, powerfully wrong.

Here's what it says on page 36 (probably why you didn't include it in your post):

(e) Googleâ(TM)s Exclusion of Books. Google may, at its discretion, exclude
particular Books from one or more Display Uses for editorial or non-editorial reasons.
However, Googleâ(TM)s right to exclude Books for editorial reasons (i.e., not for quality, user
experience, legal or other non-editorial reasons) is an issue of great sensitivity to
Plaintiffs and Google. Accordingly, because Plaintiffs, Google and the libraries all value
the principle of freedom of expression, and agree that this principle is an important part
of GBS and other Google Products and Services, Google agrees to notify the Registry of
any such exclusion of a Book for editorial reasons and of any information Google has
that is pertinent to the Registryâ(TM)s use of such Book other than Confidential Information of
Google and other than information that Google received from a third party under an
obligation of confidentiality.

All they have to do is notify the Registry if they remove a book for "editorial" reasons, which is technically what they have to do for YouTube: they have to notify the user whose video they delete.

What makes this "a third party posting?" I did this interview myself. On Friday. For free.

To clarify, if you were to get sued by an author for scanning his or work, you could not receive the right to scan the works of OTHER writers *without getting sued* as part of your potential settlement with that author. Only Google has this right. Under the settlement, its agreement with the Author's Guild counts as an agreement with the class of "all rightsholders."

I had a lot of questions, too, so I tracked down the person who knows more about the settlement than anyone else in the world, except for the lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants on the case who are locked behind a non-disclosure agreement. You might find my interview interesting. The short answer is that Google doesn't get the rights to any books that may become "orphaned" after January 2009.

You should probably read the interview or listen to it before you start having opinions about the contents.

Except that Google is indemnified from lawsuits by authors that it never contacted in the first place, whereas anybody else that tries to scan books is not. Google did not simply reach a settlement with all the authors it pissed off: Google bought the ability to not get sued by the 6.8 million rightsholders who do not know about the settlement yet. Google reached a deal with the "Author's Guild;" not individual authors. Otherwise, each author could conceivably claim $150,000 in damages for each scan. Not even Google could afford the damages they would accrue if they had to pay for every book for which they were liable. This is a protectionist piece of copyright legislation masquerading as a settlement. A piece of "orphan works" legislation, instead of an exclusive settlement, would create a market for orphan books that would protect ALL interested parties from infringement lawsuits until rights are negotiated.