Writers who call MPAA or RIAA awful need to look in the mirror

(Who is reading the paper? Find out at the bottom of this post. Picture from Expedient Means.)

They win in court, and governments are aligned with them. Individuals who stand against them on grounds of principle are slapped down hard.

But that hasn't stopped the Internet or Moore's Law. These powerful interests have had to realign their business models to deal with the new reality.

There is a micro-payment model called advertising and if your stuff is not online and available it does not exist.

This has not stopped some writers, some agents, and some academics from tilting at Google's windmill.

After years of negotiating with the Authors Guild and publishers, Google last year offered the authors of "orphan works," copyrighted but no longer published or sold, free money.

For $125 million it won the right to digitize books, and while it will offer excerpts free, the whole books must be paid for, with 63% of the money (including ad money on the free looks) going to publishers and authors.

Google takes the risks, Google pays the costs, Google does all the marketing and distribution, while you get more than half the money for sitting on your rear end. Pretty sweet, huh?

Too rich, say some University of California professors. Not rich enough, say some authors, and you're giving Google a monopoly, complain librarians. You should have negotiated with us instead, claims the William Morris Agency.

Trouble with all this is you can opt out. If you don't like the deal for the old crap you can't give away along I-75, say so and it will be taken down. Publishers of orphaned works, which aren't making money, can't opt-out en masse, because they relinquished a lot of publishing rights when they stopping publishing.

Christopher Buckley says he opted out because he's ornery. He's also still selling books.

This isn't about your stuff anyway, Chris, but keeping alive such classics as pup's God and Man at Yale. How are tomorrow's young conservatives going to discover what is eventually out of print? And when Google sells a copy or sells an ad next to the good parts, you get a cut. Free money.

Far from settled? Of course. A judge has to approve it. But if you expect Google to negotiate with you individually for your out of print crap you're just being silly.

Any other e-book publisher -- Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, etc. -- can easily negotiate with Google to pay a share of its costs and get the same deal. If Google balks sue. This deal is non-exclusive.

I should add that my own out-of-print magnum opus The Blankenhorn Effect is presently available at Google Books, and when my update is done (later this month) I very much hope to do an Internet publishing deal for it and save a tree or two.

The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, and the message of the Internet is pretty clear. Make it available and maybe, if you're lucky, someone will learn something from it. Don't make it available, and it will cease to exist. (McLuhan still exists. That's him behind the paper.)