Sign Ursula Le Guin's Petition Against the Google Book Settlement



*If you don't know what is going on here, read or listen to this interview with Professor James Grimmelmann at the New York Law School first"Ursula Le Guin has started an online petition against the Google Book Settlement and is trying to get as many names together as possible to protest the Settlement before the January 28th deadline.Here are the terms of her petition:In order to sign the petition, you can either email "googleputsch@bookviewcafe.com" and ask to be included, or you can visit the "Book View Cafe" blog and add your name in the comments section. In order to sign the petition, you must be a professional writer with some stake in the issue. You must sign the petition before January 25th.Le Guin is a fearless badass fiction-warrior anarchist, and we would expect nothing less from her than standing up to the entire publishing industry singlehanded if that is what she must do. She is leading this fight. She is old. She is experienced. She is not trying to position for her career or suck up to the existing publishing rackets. Her books are all about doing what is right in the face of immense uncertainty and oppression, and it turns out that her values are not mere words.Le Guin has been looking into the future for so long that this has become second nature to her. It doesn't take much wisdom to see that this deal is bad for fiction writers and is so legally strange that we ought to all be suspicious, merely on general principles.We at the Fiction Circus would personally like to see a rights auction for all these orphan works in order to create an exciting new digital marketplace that benefits consumers, publishers, and writers But, since this will never happen, the next best thing would be to overturn this Settlement, letting Google continue with their already-existing, legal "opt-in" electronic books program, forcing them to compete with everybody else who is trying to sell electronic books the old fashioned way: by securing rights -- case by case -- and then abiding by a contract that benefits both parties.