The battle over intellectual property rights continues. Perhaps circumstances favor the electronic newcomers, or perhaps publishers have played their hand badly, but there is a dire threat to the copyright system that has protected authors' rights to control the dissemination of their work and to reap the profits of their labor. Lynn Chu of Writers' representatives has written lucidly and at length on the proposed settlement of suits against Google:
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Signing a publishing or agency contract is an individual decision,
governed by law. Law of agency, law of copyright. My rule is, sign
nothing you don’t understand. That goes for a 1 page document and 335
times that for 335 pages. All this does is confiscate your property,
and try to make somebody else into you. A kind of Frankenstein of
everybody who ever wrote a book, all glued together. The desperation of
these parties for you to “sign,” in itself, is a signal to hold off.
We’re just at the start of the digital era, remember? Your price will
only go up, not down. Don’t fork over all your bibliographic and file
data and contracts into a Borg, not, at least, before you know what it
all means, in crisp clear detail. Furnishing them with any data at all
is only likely be used against you, mostly to force you into disputes
with all the others out there gripping pieces of paper you or somebody
else once accidentally signed, who’ll be trying to grab whatever is
being spit out of the Borg before you get to it.
This is not a rational system. It’s directly out of Hieronymus Bosch, with the same kind of promotional campaign too.
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from "The Revenge of the Epigoni" by Lynn Chu.
