The five AGs, from Missouri, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Washington, have varied reasons for their opposition, ranging from anti-monopoly to how money owed missing authors should be handled. The attorneys general are relatively late arrivals to the case, which already involves the U.S. Justice Department . A hearing will be held Oct. 7.
I have been staying away from writing about the ongoing controversy about how plans to compensate authors of out-of-print but still-in-copyright books it plans to offer online.
As the author of two such books, I won't concern myself with the 5-cents-a-year they might generate in payments from the Books Rights Registry that is created by the proposed settlement.
What does it mean for readers?
While I am happy that more and more of the world's content will be , I wonder about the value of letting Google control and monetize it. Google didn't write any of these books, it's just scanning them.