Author's Guild Remains Out of Touch with Reality

In a move that should surprise approximately nobody, the Author's Guild has announced it plans to appeal against the the Google Books decision that came down last month. They are also unhappy about printing presses, but decided to defer action on that issue.

It has become increasingly obvious that a move to lock away knowledge because somewhere there might be someone who some day might somehow profit from it is stupid, regressive, a waste of peoples' time and money, and on and on. People of all sorts - not excepting Author's Guild members - benefit from the trove of research materials. If the Author's Guild has concerns (as I do) about giving too much control to one entity doing the digitizing work then it would behoove all of us to negotiate better terms with that entity rather than continuing to drag this thing through the court system.

Sadly, we live in a world where no one speaks for us. The Guild fights for what it thinks its members ought to have, and Google makes the commercial decisions it expects to bring the most benefit. If one or the other of those things happens to be good for the public domain that's at best a fortunate accident.