On the surface, the hearing was supposed to determine if a lower court made a mistake last year when it ruled that the case could proceed as a certified class action, meaning that the Authors Guild can seek damages from Google on behalf of every writer whose book was scanned.

The three appeals court judges, however, appeared less interested in the technical aspects of class actions than they were in tackling “fair use” — a four part test that examines whether a given activity (in this case Google’s book scanning) should be exempt from copyright.

“Shouldn’t we address that first?” asked Judge Pierre Leval, a noted fair use scholar, adding that the issues in the case appeared to be “out of sequence.”

Leval and fellow judge Barrington Parker appeared sympathetic at times to Google’s position that the book scanning is transformative and acts as a discovery method, rather than as a replacement for book sales. They suggested that the lower court should address the fair use issue sooner than later.

“If the case is continued, you could face decades of litigation,” said Parker. “This project, with potentially enormous value for our culture, has this great cloud hanging over it.”

Judge Leval also suggested that the book scanning may be analogous to a famous fair use case known as “Perfect 10,” in which a California case held that showing thumbnail images in search results is fair use — even though the entire image is reproduced.

One or many lawsuits?

Google’s lawyer, Seth Waxman, reiterated Google’s position that the scanning is transformative but argued that the court should decertify the class, and require the plaintiffs to proceed individually — rather than as a unified block.

The search giant’s position is that the millions of authors in question have very different perspectives on the scanning — and that many of them support it. The latter, Google said, shouldn’t be forced into a lawsuit they don’t support. In its earlier filings, Google produced a survey that said many authors like the idea of having snippets of their books appear in the company’s search results.

The appeals court, however, appeared reluctant to break the case into multiple baskets of plaintiffs, and questioned if this would lead to separate cases for every type of book.

“You’re going to have to get this resolved. Are you going to have five, 10, 20 different lawsuits? Poetry, science, math table ligation?” Judge Parker wondered

The Authors Guild, meanwhile, wants to go ahead with the fair use ruling, at trial if necessary, without distinguishing the different types of books and authors at issue — a potentially risky proposition for the Guild too.

The court drew a laugh when it asked the Guild’s lawyer, Robert LaRocca, if the group would be comfortable betting the whole fair use ruling on a sample scanned book of Google’s choosing.

The judges also asked LaRocca to explain why some authors were supporting Google’s position; he described them as “a very, very vocal group out at Berkeley.”

What next: some possible end games

It’s risky to read legal tea leaves from the questions judges ask. But, in this case, the appeals court appeared to be strongly considering remanding the case for a ruling on the fair use question — a decision that could then be appealed back to the Second Circuit.

The situation, however, is complicated by internal judicial politics. Specifically, the lower court judge who would have to take up the fair issue is Denny Chin — who now sits on the Second Circuit as a colleague of the three judges who heard today’s hearing. In the past, Chin has shown more sympathy to copyright owners than Leval; the trick for the appeals court, then, is to hand the case back to Chin with obvious guidance, but without upbraiding his handling of it so far.

There is also, of course, the question of money. Google has enough cash to litigate to the Supreme Court and back without breaking a sweat. The Authors Guild, on the other hand, may be feeling stretched as it pays for the appeals in the current case, while also pursuing a parallel case, known as HathiTrust, against a group of university libraries.

At the Tuesday hearing, the Authors Guild’s attorney said paying up would cost Google just 90 days of earnings — or around three billion dollars. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s not going to happen.

First, Google can litigate this thing till the cows come home. Second, the actual amount at issue is much less than the extravagant multibillion dollar figures flashed in numerous headlines. As I’ve explained before, the Authors Guild is seeking $750 per scanned book — but the actual number of books that would qualify is far fewer than the overall number of what Google has scanned.

Another possible outcome is that the appeals court agrees with Google’s request to decertify the class. This would likely force the Authors Guild to pack up and go home, leaving the handful of individual author plaintiffs to take on Google’s mighty lawyer machine out of their own pockets — game over, in other words.

Finally, the two sides may enter settlement negotiations (if they haven’t already) to permit the Authors Guild to enjoy a symbolic victory and, possibly, recoup some of their legal fees, while letting Google appear as a good guy. But don’t count on this, especially, if Google believes it can win the fair use ruling.

To read more background and insider details on the whole saga, see my e-book: “The Battle for the Books: Inside Google’s Gambit to create the world’s biggest library.”

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The move comes as Aereo, which recently won a major appeals court ruling on nearly the same issue in New York, prepares to offer its service in Boston and 22 other markets as soon as this month. CBS and other broadcasters have vowed to sue to stop Aereo in those new markets, a threat that appears to have led it to file the new court action. (The new filing, reported by AllThingsD, refers to recent public statements and Twitter feeds by CBS executives, including one that says “we’ll sue”).

So what exactly is the meaning of Aereo’s new lawsuit? Here’s what one copyright expert familiar with the issue had to say:

Aereo’s decision to file a separate declaratory judgment action at this stage is unorthodox. They’ve prevailed on a preliminary injunction motion at the district and circuit court level — which means that both the Southern District and the 2d Circuit have ruled they are likely to succeed on the merits — so it’s unusual to seek a declaratory judgment on the same issues.

Recall that the appeals court decision from last month already protects Aereo for the immediate future in the U.S. Second District, a territory that covers the states of New York, Vermont and Connecticut. This means that the new declaratory action Aereo is seeking will not really change any facts on the ground but could give the company another favorable verdict — but not one that will determine its fate in Boston (which is in the First Circuit) or any of the other legal jurisdictions where Aereo plans to open shop.

The most likely explanation, then, is that the move is part of the increasingly pitched PR battle between Aereo and the broadcasters who, in another recent appeal, accused the upstart of creating “havoc” and “massive disruption” in the television industry. The broadcasters have also threatened to pull their signals altogether and distribute their channels, including Fox and ABC, only on pay TV.

Aereo, for its part, argues that its technology, which assigns every subscriber a personal antenna, is akin to private viewing through a DVR system.  The company’s CEO, Chet Kanojia, has accused the broadcasters of extracting exorbitant fees by forcing viewers to accept cable bundles stuffed with channels they don’t want to watch.

Aereo’s new lawsuit, therefore, gives it a way to gain the upper hand on the media message (for a short time at least) – and possibly pick up some additional legal language from a judge who has taken the company’s side in the past.

In the bigger picture, the Aereo fight is part of a great game over the future of the TV industry. Aereo, which is backed by a major investment from media mogul Barry Diller, has also been the subject of acquisition rumors by satellite provider Dish. Broadcasters fear that an alliance between the two companies could provide an end-run around the existing system that requires cable and satellite providers to pay for use of the over-the-air signals.

The final outcome could well end up at the Supreme Court given a current split between the courts in New York and a district court in California, which shut down a similar service to Aereo last year. In the meantime, it’s possible that a patchwork of decisions could result in Aereo being legal in half the country and forbidden in the other half.

In another recent development, the four major sports leagues have joined the anti-Aereo chorus by filing court papers to support the broadcasters’ request that a full panel of the Second Circuit reconsider its decision. The NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball argue that the appeals court was wrong to consider Aereo a “private” transmission like singing in the shower:

An individual who sings a copyrighted lyric in the shower engages in a private performance […] A commercial service (like Aereo) that retransmits the broadcast of a copyrighted television program to thousands of paying subscribers at the same time is not in any way comparable.

Here’s a copy of Aereo’s new lawsuit:

Aereo Complaint for Declaratory Judgment – FINAL FILED

//

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In a ruling handed down Monday in San Francisco, US District Judge Charles Breyer refused the request of PadMapper, 3 Taps and other defendants to throw out a laundry list of claims by Craigslist, which is accusing the defendants of hacking, copyright infringement and more.

In the view of Craigslist, the newer companies are plundering data which it has collected and compiled at great effort. The defendants, meanwhile, say Craigslist is monopolizing data that belongs to users while offering an ugly, out-dated service. The lawsuit broke out last summer.

In a key part of Tuesday’s highly-technical decision, the judge examined whether Craigslist’s terms of service meant that users had given the site permission to use their ads as the basis for copyright lawsuits. The judge said Craigslist didn’t obtain such permission, except for a short period in the summer of 2012 when the site changed its terms of service — before backing down in the face of a popular backlash.

What this means is that Craigslist can rely on users’ ads to go forward with its copyright lawsuit, but only those ads written between July 16 and August 8, 2012. The judge also said said that Craigslist may have its own copyright over the way it has compiled the ads, though it will still have to prove that this compilation is an “original” artistic work.

The hacking portion of the decision, which is based on the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a similar law in California, is also nuanced. The judge wrote that the companies’ attempts to access Craigslist data after receiving cease-and-desist letters might be “unauthorized access” under the laws, but implicitly suggested that the laws are out of date.

The judge also gave Craigslist a minor victory by agreeing to shelve counter-claims from Padmapper and 3Taps over the monopoly issue. The defendants won their own minor victory when the judge threw out Craigslist’s conspiracy claims.

So what does all this mean? Monday’s decision is very preliminary and was about what can stay in the case — the real action will start at the summary judgment stage, likely later this year, where each side can try to win on a matter of law.

In the bigger picture, the case is important because it is helping to set the rules over the degree to which companies can treat data controlled by other firms as a public good.

This is just a short summary of a complex decision. If you want to get further into the weeds, here is a marked-up copy of the ruling itself:

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The controversy turned  on art projects in which Prince incorporated photographs from Yes Rasta, a portrait book about Rastafarians by photographer Patrick Cariou. In some cases, Prince altered the photos so the originals could barely be recognized:

But in other cases, Prince made only minor alterations, such as adding face blotches and a blue guitar:

Cariou, who earned about $8,000 from the sale of his book, sued Prince for copyright infringement. Prince, whose individual works fetched up to $2 million, argued that his modifications amounted to a “fair use” exception under copyright law.

In 2011, a federal judge sided with Cariou and issued an injunction against Prince and an order for any unsold works to be destroyed (they were not).

Can judges be art critics?

In her decision, U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts concluded that Prince’s work was not transformative — and did not qualify for fair use — because it didn’t satirize or otherwise comment on the original photographs. On appeal, a unanimous three-judge court wrote that Batts got the law wrong and said there was no such requirement under fair use.

Citing Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans and the rap group 2 Live Crew’s parody of “Pretty Woman,” the appeals court noted that many fair use cases did indeed comment on the original, but that this was not essential. In the case of Prince, the court said, his works are transformative in part because they are “hectic and provocative” compared to Cariou’s serene and beautiful photographs.

On a technical level, the “transformative” requirement is just a sub-step in one part of a four-pronged fair use analysis. Increasingly, however, it’s also becoming a shorthand for courts to determine if someone is using an image in a new and legitimate fashion, or just ripping off and devaluing the original.

In resolving the Prince case, the appeals court found that 25 of the 30 images were transformative but added that it did could not say “confidently” whether five of the others — including the blue guitar picture — were as well. It returned the case to the original judge to mull over the five pictures in more detail.

One of the three appeals court judges stated, however, that he was uncomfortable acting in the role of art critic and that the original judge should re-evaluate all 30 pictures with the help of expert opinion and other evidence:

So what is “transformative” on the internet?

The Prince decision could affect not just the art world, but internet culture as well. That’s because the decision comes at a time when images are becoming ever more central to online news and social media platforms — and while the rules for using them are unclear.

Sites like BuzzFeed, for instance, have taken an aggressive approach to image appropriation, declaring that almost any use is “transformative.” This approach is well-suited to the fast-paced, mash-up style of internet journalism but is also a source of frustration to photographers and others who feel artists deserve more control over their work.

The Prince ruling, while not a green light for anyone to use photographs as they see fit, appears to provide broader legal cover to appropriation artists and experimenters. Here’s the decision itself with some of the more significant passages underlined.

A previous version of this article stated that the “Pretty Woman” parody was by Salt-n-Pepa. It was by 2 Live Crew.

Cariou v Prince, 2nd Circ

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In case you’re unfamiliar, Aereo lets users beam over-the-air TV signals to computers and mobile devices like the iPhone for $1 a day or $8 a month.

The service is also at the center of a legal hullabaloo as broadcasters, upset that Aereo is not paying retransmission fees, warn that it will create “havoc” and “massive disruption” in the TV industry.

Aereo has won a series of surprising legal victories after New York judges found that its tiny antenna system, which permit viewers to watch and record shows, result in private transmissions that do not violate copyright law. A dissenting judge has called the antenna arrangement a “sham.”

The service has been available in New York City for months and, though the company promised in January that it would launch in 22 new cities, Aereo has yet to actually go live anywhere else.

What today’s announcement means for Boston viewers is that they will be able to watch stations like CBS, NBC, Fox and ABC anywhere they please.

(Image by Samuel Borges Photography via Shutterstock)

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The DPLA also offers a dynamic map, a timeline of exhibitions and app-building tools to build up the cultural collection even further.

Is there anything the DPLA doesn’t have? Well, we could start with the 20 million or so digital books that Google has scanned at hundreds of libraries in the last decade. This collection — which is much larger than the 2.4 million records at the DPLA — has gone unmentioned in the course of the new library’s launch this week. Instead, Google’s trove is gathering digital dust as a ceaseless copyright case between the company and the Authors Guild grinds on.

This is a shame. While the DPLA is a beautiful and important endeavor, it also feels woefully incomplete. Its library collection does’t include major institutions like Stanford and Michigan (alma mater of Google CEO Larry Page) which have enormous digital resources – this can hardly be described as “of America.” More seriously, the holes in the DPLA’s catalog show how a once-unified effort to digitize the country’s knowledge has become a patchwork affair.

As I described in Battle for the Books, Harvard librarian Robert Darnton not only pulled the university out of its one-time partnership with Google, but also led an intellectual campaign to stop the company’s scanning plans. Darnton’s actions not only drove legal opposition to a proposed settlement, but also produced lasting resentment within the librarian community — some of whom regard Darnton as a spoilsport and a demagogue.

The result is that the U.S. now has multiple, unconnected repositories that represent a digital fracturing of its culture heritage. It’s worth noting that DPLA also comes in addition to the Internet Archive, a long-time pioneer in digital scanning (I found the image at right by searching the DPLA; the results led me to a Connecticut library and then the Internet Archive).

This is in part due to copyright issues. While Google has made a strong case that its scanning activities are fair use, authors fear they will lose control over their works — and many people oppose granting Google or any other private company a role in the country’s library systems.

For now, the DPLA, which is funded by governments and foundations, is not in discussion with Google Books. It has, however, been talking to the Hathi Trust, a network of university libraries that have connected their digital collections (they obtained the collection as part of the agreement under which Google scanned their books).

“We’re just getting started and are in talks with many large content hubs; yes, we have spoken to HathiTrust and can imagine a very complimentary collaboration with them.” wrote Executive Director Dan Cohen.

Google did not return a request for comment.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that the DPLA partnered with libraries in only six states. According to the official DPLA release, the organization “has partnered with six state and regional digital libraries and an equal number of large cultural heritage institutions— including the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, and Harvard University.”

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In the latest twist in a long and closely-watched copyright case brought by Viacom, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton granted summary judgment to YouTube after finding executives at the video site did not have “red flag” knowledge that made them liable for content uploaded by users.

The ruling comes one year after the Second Court of Appeals reversed Stanton’s earlier decision in 2012 to dismiss the case, and ordered the judge to revisit his ruling in light of emails that suggested the YouTube founders had knowledge of copyright infringement. In his new decision, issued on Thursday Stanton rejected Viacom’s legal theory as “extravagant” and stated that “its foundation is an anachronistic [...] concept.”

On its surface, the case turned on whether YouTube had to pay damages to Viacom for thousands of unauthorized clips of shows like South Park and Seinfeld that appeared on the site. But on a deeper level, the case is significant because it is helping to determine what digital technology companies must do to protect copyright.

Under a law known as the DMCA, online services like YouTube are not responsible for the copyright infringement of their users. The law, which was crafted to ensure that new digital platforms didn’t get smothered by copyright claims, grants “safe harbors” to sites provided they provide a way for owners to take down their content, and so long as the site is not complicit in users’ copyright violations.

Viacom and the entertainment industry, which believes that YouTube have unfairly profited from copyrighted content, had hoped to shrink the scope of the “safe harbors” by drawing attention to the DMCA’s so-called “red flag” provision — a part of the law that means a site is liable if those controlling it are willfully blind to copyright violations.

In deciding to reinstate the case, the appeals court agreed that YouTube was not responsible for most of the clips for which Viacom was claiming over $1 billion dollars. However, it said the potentially incriminating emails required the lower court to examine if YouTube knew or should have known about specific pieces of infringing content.

In the new decision Stanton said Viacom, in its legal arguments, had conceded that it was unable to identify specific examples of specific copyright clips of which the YouTube founders should have been aware. He added that Viacom had tried to solve the situation by claiming that it was YouTube’s responsibility to show they did not know, but that this was a misinterpretation of the law.

Viacom is entitled to appeal Stanton’s decision a second time but its safe harbors argument may be running out of steam. In a similar case involving defunct video service, Veoh, a California appeals court emphatically concluded that the safe harbors applied.

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In a new court filing (embedded below), the broadcasters claim the decision “threatens to cause massive disruption to the television industry” and “will wreak commercial havoc,” and request a full panel of the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit the ruling.

The start-up Aereo has been at the center of a storm in recent months because its technology threatens to blow-up the existing model of pay TV, which is based on selling viewers a bundle of channels, that include over-the-air stations like NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox. Aereo is backed by a $58 million investment from media mogul Barry Diller and others, and lets customers watch and record TV without a subscription for $1 a day or $8 a month.

In the past, other companies have retransmitted TV signals over the internet but broadcasters quickly smashed them for copyright infringement. Aereo, however, has survived two major court challenges thanks to its technology which assigns a mini-antenna (see pic below ) to each subscriber; the service is now live in New York City and is slated to arrive imminently in 22 more markets.

In the new filing, broadcasters howl that Aereo’s individual antenna system is just a loophole to get around a copyright regimes that requires any company that plays over-the-air signals, including cable and satellite firms, to pay retransmission fees. The brief also cites a paidContent story to warn that Aereo wants to team up with distributors like Dish network and Time Warner Cable to expand its reach.

On a broader level, the legal manœuvreing is part of a great game between Aereo and the broadcasters over the future of TV that could end up at the Supreme Court. In the coming battle, the broadcasters are pinning their hopes on a recent California court case, which shut down an Aereo clone and rejected the theory that a private antenna means a transmission is not “public” under copyright law – a theory accepted by two out three judges on the Second Circuit court.

In the new filing, the broadcasters rely heavily on the opinion of dissenting judge Denny Chin, who described Aereo’s technology as a “sham” and a “Rube Goldberg” device that “over-engineered” to dodge copyright.

While the dissent and the California case provide the broadcasters with ammunition, the request for a review by all of the judges on the New York court is a long shot. This is because, unlike other appeals courts, the Second Circuit almost never agrees to hear so-called “en banc” appeals; in the event it did rehear the case, the judges would be reluctant to accept the broadcasters’ invitation to declare that they were wrong on an earlier case that formed the basis of their opinion for Aereo.

This means the Supreme Court — or Congress — is the broadcasters’ best hope. Time is not on their side, however, because it would take years for the legal case to be heard and decided. By that time, technology and consumer habits for TV may have changed dramatically.

The CEO of Aereo will offer his two cents on the bigger picture of TV at paidContent Live which is taking place on Wednesday in New York City.

Legal types — here’s a marked up version of the broadcasters’ very well drafted legal brief:

Aereo en Banc Petition

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One of the most prominent, Microsoft researcher danah boyd (who spells her name without capital letters), said on Twitter that the takeover was “sad,” and that she doesn’t believe Mendeley can help Elsevier repair the reputation it has developed for being against open access to research — a reputation that is based on the publisher’s support of the failed anti-piracy legislation SOPA, among other things.

Another prominent critic of the acquisition is David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a co-director of the university’s Library Innovation Lab, which played a role in designing the new Digital Public Library of America project. Despite the assurances of executives at Mendeley that it would remain open — including its access API — Weinberger expressed scepticism that the company would be able to resist Elsevier’s attempts to make it more closed (he expanded on this on his blog).

Some of those who responded to the news of the acquisition seemed to see Mendeley’s acceptance of the takeover as a breach of faith, since the company had been such a vocal supporter of the open-access movement — a movement that many saw as directly opposed to the interests of companies like Elsevier. At least one observer compared it to “Haliburton buying Greenpeace,” and others made comparisons to the Empire in the Star Wars movie universe, or the Borg from Star Trek — both evil forces who eventually absorb or destroy the heroes of the story.

Mendeley’s director of academic outreach, William Gunn, responded to many of the critical comments about the acquisition, and said that the company plans to remain as open as possible following the deal:

Elsevier has been the target of a sustained attack from open-access advocates who organized a boycott of the company’s journals, galvanized by Fields Medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers — arguing that its publications are too expensive and keep valuable research locked up in a virtual cartel. One commenter on a news story about the Mendeley acquisition said: “They spent their whole life as a company arguing they were the next big thing in open publishing only to sell out,” while a commenter on a thread at Hacker News about the deal said:

“Mendeley should be ashamed, and you personally should be ashamed for perpetuating this nonsense. Within a year your company will be effectively dismantled and anyone left over who actually cares about open access can start over from scratch. I wish them luck.”

News of the acquisition re-ignited interest in the “mendelete” hashtag on Twitter, which was devoted to criticisms of the deal and the exploration of alternatives such as Zotero. One commenter said: “Was Mendeley more about its values or its services? Some of its biggest supporters have become its shrillest critics #mendelete.” If nothing else, these kinds of responses show just how much work Elsevier has ahead of it when it comes to reassuring academics and others that their commitment to openness is real. As Emily Bell at Columbia University put it:

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Luis Santos

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Turow’s piece, which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times, could have been a rallying cry to support American literature. Instead, it amounts to a hysterical rant full of slipshod reasoning that shows again the Guild’s propensity for tactical errors and alienating potential allies.

The central conceit of the piece is the U.S. Constitution’s intellectual property clause, which permits Congress to grant limited monopolies to “promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts.” Turow, despite being a lawyer, miscasts the clause to suggest it awards a constitutional right to authors and to say that the current copyright system betrays the Founders. This is misleading twice over.

First, the grant of copyright is discretionary — as with many of the other items listed in Article I, Section 8, copyright is a power (like declaring war or borrowing money) that Congress can choose to exercise when it sees fit. The clause does not, as Turow writes, “instruct” Congress to protect authors’ rights.

The second problem with the constitutional conceit is that Turow and others would likely have been appalled by the Founders’ ideas about copyright protection. This was an age when Alexander Hamilton opted for piracy as an industrial strategy, and authors’ rights were precarious at best. Indeed, foreign writers received none at all (ask Charles Dickens what he thought of the Founders’ copyright law).

In lamenting the attenuated state of U.S. copyright law, Turow also fails to mention that protection for authors has been expanded from its original 28-year term to the life of the author plus 70 years. Congress and the courts, in other words, have signed off on a scheme that locks up titles like Presumed Innocent until the year 2100 or beyond — is this not enough copyright for you, Mr. Turow?

It is these absurd terms — plus harsh penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement — that have helped to make copyright such a mess in the digital age. In an era when the internet grants every writer a printing press and a distribution system, it seems absurd to hand out century-long copyright terms.

Instead of discussing how copyright can work in digital times, Turow instead lashes out at academics and librarians who are trying to find a way to distribute neglected books and locked-up research to broader audiences through efforts like the Hathi Trust. In my experience, these people respect copyright — they just don’t like the way that some abuse it — and their goal is expanding access to knowledge. Librarians at Duke are among those who are most forcefully challenging the current state of copyright; you can decide for yourself here if they are selling out authors.

In addition to a potshot at the Supreme Court, Turow also trots out the usual canard that sites like Google and Yahoo are complicit in book piracy with “paid ads decorating the margins of [their] pages.” While book piracy is indeed a problem, Turow’s suggestion that search engines are engaged in deliberate criminal behavior is far-fetched; these are mature companies with big and legitimate customers that have scant need or interest to pander to pirates. (While Google has landed in very hot water in the past over ads for illegal pharmacies, it now says it vies to curtail the bad advertising actors.)

In short, what Turow has done is to raise an important issue — how to devise an economic means to support modern literary culture — and then alienated nearly every potential ally, not to mention distorting the picture to his own ends. If Turow and the Authors Guild are really on the side of writers, they should toss the specious and acerbic arguments and work instead to build a coalition of advocates for a fair and workable copyright regime.

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