Thursday, September 22, 2005

EFF predicts Google victory: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes that the Authors Guild will lose its copyright suit against Google. (Via Open Access News.) Forgive my cynicism, but all the worthy commentary on copyright law and fair use ignores an interesting possibility: that the real, unspeakable motive of the Authors Guild is to block Google Print to preserve the scarcity of works on given topics that only exists because it is difficult to find competing works. Well-known authors with access to publishers have much greater access to the attention of customers, through advertising, bookstore placement, and reviews, than the many competing authors whose works are backlisted or out of print. If competing works were easy to find, well-known authors would suddenly have much greater competition and they and their publishers would lose pricing power. 7:48:28 PM