No Authors Have Been Harmed in the Making of This Library
19th September 2011
We’ve been puzzling over the Author’s Guild’s decision to sue several university libraries for participating in the digitization and storage of millions of works (largely in connection with the Google Books project) and making scans of some of those works available to the academic community. Simply put, it appears that the Guild is dead set on wasting time and money addressing imaginary harms, whether or not its efforts might actually benefit either its members or the public.
What puzzles me is why anybody pays attention to a group suing on behalf of people who are not members of their group. How do they have what we lawyers like to call ‘standing’?