Her new paper (title below)  is online at: www.gillianspraggs.com/gbs/GBS_survival_aid.html

Here’s an excerpt from Gillian Spragg’s paper:

The Google Book Settlement: a survival aid for UK authors
Dec. 11th, 2009

I opted out in August. Having taken a good look at the agreement in its amended form, I have no intention of opting in again.

But every author’s situation and outlook is different (something to which the Google Book Settlement agreement, with its one-size-fits-all provisions, pays not the least attention).

This ‘survival aid’ has been written not specifically to persuade authors to opt out but to help provide the information they will need in assessing the scope and detail of the settlement and weighing up their options. Which still remain open: for a short period only. The deadline for opting out is 28 January.

This paper is offered in good faith, after a lot of thought and study, but with no guarantee that it gets everything absolutely right. The settlement agreement is a complex and difficult document (some say, perhaps jokingly, that even the lawyers who drafted it don’t entirely understand it). My summary does, however, contain references to the relevant sections and subsections; if you are an author (or an agent), it should help you find your way around. It is not a substitute for reading the agreement itself, which is probably best studied at the Public Index, where the hyperlinks make it easier to navigate.

Although parts of it relate particularly to authors published in the UK, most of it relates just as much to authors published in Canada, Australia and the US.

If you have arrived here out of the blue: I am not a lawyer. Any author with valuable literary properties to safeguard would be sensible to consult one.

Why am I doing this? Because I have been disturbed by the inadequacy, and sometimes the demonstrable inaccuracy, of material that I have seen that has been circulated to or directed at authors. Because, in my experience, it has not been made at all easy for authors to acquire the full information they need to

a) weigh up their options

b) put their decisions properly into practice.

If you are thinking of opting out, you will find information on how to do this here.

If you have been planning to stay in and claim your books, there is quite a lot of information in this ‘survival aid’ that it is likely you will find worth reading.

If you have claimed your books and now wish you had opted out: you can still change your mind and opt out, so long as you take action before 28 January.

but the one imposed on Canadian writers by Google Inc. was disconcerting, to say the least.

Since 2004, the search engine giant has quietly gone about scanning millions of books found in American libraries, including thousands by Canadian copyright holders who were never consulted, and did not grant their permission. Having built up this digital treasure trove with a variety of commercial aims in mind, Google agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit for massive copyright infringement brought by the Authors Guild of America, offering to pay $125-million (U.S.) in “thank-you” money, for wont of a better phrase, to publishers and their authors.

A deadline of Sept. 4 was established for all those caught up in the scanning project, however involuntarily. Authors could either “opt in” to the terms of the settlement, or “opt out” – thus retaining the right to sue Google down the road.

Because American copyright law doesn’t clearly distinguish between international works published by a U.S. company and works that pop up in an American library, virtually all of world literature and scholarship has become fair game for these settlement terms. Canadian authors have been left scrambling to protect their intellectual ownership without any sense of the long-term implications.

It isn’t even clear what can be gained from “opting out,” since Google has no legal obligation to remove the books it has already scanned. The company is currently doing so merely as a matter of “good faith.” (American conservative Christopher Buckley wants none of that. “Whenever I hear capitalism proclaiming noble motives, something makes me check my wallet,” he observed recently of the settlement.) “This is a pivotal moment in the history of access to recorded information,” Susan Benton, president of the Urban Libraries Council, wrote in an Aug. 19 letter to U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, who has been tasked with reviewing the deal.

A brief filed to the court by Amazon.com is typical of the slow-dawning sense of alarm being expressed: the settlement terms, Amazon charged, “are the stuff of anti-trust nightmares.”

For one thing, Amazon and all other book sellers and libraries unassociated with Google will be precluded from digitizing out-of-print and orphaned works in the public domain. Moreover, works will be deemed to be orphaned if their authors don’t sign Google’s Books Registry. As the Writer’s Union of Canada points out in its brief to the court: “Authors should not lose control over their works because they fail to sign up in a registry in another country.”

It is unacceptable to be bossed around and held to deadlines in this fashion by foreign interests. Canadians who publish books, including everyone from the leader of the federal Liberals to business people, historians, doctors and poets, deserve more than a meagre opt in/opt out say in the future of their collective intellectual property.

Globe and Mail, Editorial Page, Monday, Sept. 07, 2009