If Lynn Chu’s Wall Street Journal op-ed is accurate, the class-action lawsuit against Google for digitizing and posting copyrighted books is reaching a horrifying conclusion. Apparently, Google has reached a settlement in which Google gets to post books, and a new entity is created that decides how much the authors will be paid. (Also, the class-action lawyers make $30 million.) Shockingly, this arrangement would apply to authors who are not a party to the litigation and have not consented to the settlement.
This can’t be right, can it? The comments to Jonathan Adler’s strongly suggest it is, at least to some extent (it’s hard to know what a 385-page legal settlement actually means). Lynn Chu expands on authors’ options here.
Internet Scofflaw 