An open letter to J.R. Salamanca

"Earlier this week, only days after it filed its ill-advised lawsuit against the HathiTrust and five of Hathi’s partner universities, the Authors Guild gleefully announced that they had been able to find, with relative ease, the author of one of the books on Hathi’s initial list of orphan works. You, of course, were that author, and the work in question was your 1958 novel The Lost Country. It is not a comfortable position to be a pawn in a game of “gotcha,” especially when it involves litigation. What I want to say to you is the same thing I say to faculty authors at the institution where I work: “Consider carefully where your own best interests lie, and manage your copyright to serve those interests.” ..."