Most small publishers only received letters from Google last week
asking them to contact their out-of-print authors and let them know
that soon their rights will revert to Google unless they “opt out”
immediately. This gives small publishers two weeks to track down their
writers, many of whom spend at least half the year in an alcoholic
coma.They will not succeed at this. Many writers will not know what is happening until it is too late.
I want to know what deal the Internet Archive will offer to
rightsholders in order to compete with Google. Kahle wants everything
to be free, does this mean that he will strip away even Google’s meager
profit-sharing deal to authors if he can? — the fiction circus