Copyright isn’t a right that libraries have. There is no ‘owning library’ blank in the copyright application. The original five libraries (including Harvard) who made the deal with Google made that mistake, assuming that having a book in their collection somehow gave them the right to let Google make digital scans for public display. It doesn’t. It’s easy to suspect that in their heart of hearts they knew that, since that explains their zeal to let Google bear the expense of legal action and penalties.

Never forget that copyright is bestowed on authors and from them to anyone they choose. If you or I buy a book, we can mark it up as much as we want. We can quote from it, but only in a limited extent, and we can sell that copy to anyone we want. But we can’t make copies of that copy and sell them through bookstores or post digital copies online. A copyright lets the holder decide who can make copies. He can, if he wants, ban any additional copies. You and I may not like that, but that’s the law.

The real horror in this settlement is that it perverts class action law, a narrow and specialized area in law, to effectively strip authors in some 160 countries around the world of their U.S. copyright. And central to that horror is the forced opt-in-if-you-don’t-opt-out provision in the settlement. That date was originally set to May 5. Only the intervention of myself and six other authors delayed that date to September 4. That date is a ticking time bomb.

A good question is to ask how many authors have actually taken action to opt-in or opt out. Michael Boni, the official representative of what the settlement calls the ‘author sub-class’ told me in an email that some four percent of their original group of mostly academic ‘orphan’ authors had opted in or out. Boni thinks that is marvelous.

I compare it to an election and wonder how valid an election would be if so few people heard about that election and the issues being decided, that only four percent of them voted. And keep in mind that that is the best statistic we’re going to get. Move outside academia and let the fuss die out, with Google scanners running still faster, and the percentage of authors who formally agree with what Google is doing with their labors is likely to shrink well below one percent. A banana republic with a self-appointed ‘President for Life’ is more democratic than that.

But the silliness of these university libraries is nothing compared to the foolishness of publishers who’ve either jumped on the Google bandwagon or are standing on the sidelines. With this settlement, Google is setting itself up to be the largest publisher on the planet and one with cost advantages that no other publisher can compete with. Color those publishers stupid.

I might add that authors, researchers and students should be worried too. It’s not just any malice that Google might have toward what you’re saying or studying, as real as that danger may be, it’s their incompetence in separating good books from the trash.

Here is an example. I have a book on eugenics that no less an author than Michael Crichton recommended in his last book. Search for its topic on Amazon and it comes up as the second entry on the first page. It is that useful and that popular. I also placed a digital copy in Goggle book search a few years ago. Search for that same topic in Google book search and my book comes up at the bottom of the seventh page, buried after pages and pages of other books, most of them trash. I don’t blame Google’s malice. I blame their stupidity. Google doesn’t know how to handle books. Amazon does. That’s another reason why we don’t want them becoming a publisher and distributor rolled into one huge and unthinking monopoly.

The plan could very well lead to “a restructuring of the publishing industry and a dramatic change to the nature of libraries.”

Finally.

If nothing else, Google is at least making the players aware… even more than Amazon has so far… that e-books are more of a game-changer than most of us have realized.