As a member of The Authors Guild and an author of out-of-print books, I have always said the Google Book Settlement, which is a result of The Authors Guild’s lawsuit, benefitted only the book publishing industry, not authors of books. Yesterday (March 22) Judge Denny Chin of the U. S. Second Circuit threw out the Google Book Settlement. I’m looking forward to reading the decision, because the only information I have now comes from The Authors Guild.

Google Books and The Authors Guild have consistently ignored my complaints that I own all rights to two out-of-print books published by McFarland & Company. They insist instead that as the publisher McFarland has the right not only to royalties on Google Book sales (which they are then supposed to divvy up with me), but they also insist that only McFarland has the right to receive reports of the number of people who browse for my books, download samples of my books, or buy copies of my books.

Even McFarland has acknowledged that they have no rights whatsoever to any of these things—acknowledged in writing to me. They suggested I contact Google Books and send them a copy of the letter. The only problem is that Google Books refuses to respond to any of my online correspondence and has no physical mailing address.

According to emails I received from The Authors Guild, Judge Chin primarily objected to the opt-out provision available to authors and said an opt-in would be a better “opt” for authors. Thank you, Judge Chin. Yes, obviously.

The only option any author of an out-of-print book had under the Google Book Settlement with The Authors Guild was to opt-in and claim copyrights to books that Google had already scanned without permission and posted online without permission. After that, a clearinghouse of anonymous lawyers was tasked with policing the distribution of royalties. The clearinghouse refused to acknowledge that when by contract a publisher’s “first North American copyrights” to a book had reverted to the author, the publisher no longer has any rights whatsoever to the text.

I don’t know what attorney Scott Turow, president of The Authors Guild, doesn’t understand that.

To compound matters, my dissertation was also scanned by Google Books without my permission. Since dissertations are considered unpublished works, it was not covered by the Google Book Settlement, and, as a consequence, I have no control at all over what Google Books or The University of Michigan Library does with the scanned image.

Please, Mr. Turow, explain to me again why the Google Book Settlement was such a great thing for me?