Le Guin Speaks Out on Authors’ Rights

I’m afraid an awful lot of writers have not really informed themselves. You know, we tend to be sort of busy doing our writing and sort of feeling that if we belong to a group like Authors Guild or something, that they’ll look after it and sort of see to it that our rights aren’t infringed to the point where we can’t make a living any longer.

That comment came from noted author and GBS objector Ursula Le Guin in her extended interview with the PBS NewsHour Art Beat Blog.

When interviewer Jeffrey Brown asked Le Guin to clarify her opposition to the GBS, she noted:

Because it will allow Google to — actually as the head of our copyright office remarked — to an end run around copyright. It also allows a corporation to kind of re-write the rules such as copyright, which ought to be controlled firmly by the government. You know how Disney got to the government and got them to re-write copyright law to the extent of extending it to 70 years so that Disney could keep Mickey Mouse? That’s what we’ve got to kind of protect, is that corporations should not be allowed to write the rules that protects both writers and readers.

Finally, Le Guin reaffirmed her support of a digital library that will share information.  Just not a library created on Google’s self-interested terms:

And that library, that is my dream too. It should be a public library. It should be the Library of Congress extended through this immense field of digitalizing sort of everything we have, and it’s not just information. It’s art, too. What I write is not information. I write fiction. It doesn’t inform anybody of anything. But it has its value. And it gets forgotten in all this talk about information should be free, you know.

A transcript of the interview can be found here.