Make your voice heard. Click here to participate in the Forum and let us know what you think. Home > Membership > Forum > Forum Responses MEMBERSHIP FORUM RESPONSES: Click on names to read the full responses. As of November 30, 2005, 57% of PEN Members do object to the Google Print Library Project, as it exists today, and 43% have no objections to it. Following is a selection of those responses. Edward J. Renehan Jr. Membership Forum Response I believe it is key that we all err on the side of securing and maintaining intellectual property rights for those who create the intellectual property in the first place. Gregory McNamee: Membership Forum Response Google's opt-out plan requires me, as a content creator, to beg to have my work excluded from scanning, which is much the same as saying that my home is free to be burglarized... David Levering Lewis' Membership Forum Response I regard Google's policy as arrogantly exploitative. Jerrold Mundis' Membership Forum Response Google's position is arrogant, avaricious, and thievish. They should be vigorously condemned for and resisted in this. Joseph Amiel: Memership Forum Response We who create books and other written material depend on their copyrights to provide and protect our livelihoods. James O. Grunebaum's Membership Forum Response For works still under copyright, prior permission with some compensation is the only just way to respect authors' intellectual property. Robert Lima: Membership Forum Response Google would provide worldwide opportunities for those books to be read, their ideas promulgated, their authors to become better known. Alexander Chee Membership Forum Response I'd wait until I lived in a society that took care of me justly for my contributions, and not start now, inside a capitalist machine that bleeds its citizens of income until they don't have money for things like music or books... Mary Saracino: Membership Forum Reponse In general, I think online access to portions of published/copyrighted work is good from a promotional standpoint... Hettie Jones' Membership Forum Response Nothing will stop the onward press of info-gluts to commandeer all the printed words in the world. But who will protect the writer? Charles Fuller's Membership Forum Response Google has billions of dollars—am I to believe they have no obligation to take some of their earnings and pay us? Jayne Lyn Stahl's Membership Forum Response To limit, and curtail, the parameters of the Internet, and technology, would be like trying to put braces on a comet. Jonathan Rosenbaum: Membership Forum Response Having my work for the Chicago Review posted on the Internet for free—as it was for many years, until around 2001—helped my career incalculably. Margaret Diehl: Membership Forum Response I wouldn't want the whole book available but small portions provide free advertising. Thomas Lipscomb: Membership Forum Response It seems patently ridiculous to take that stance and then announce its intention to simply steal what it wants from writers and copyright holders. James Raimes' Memership Forum Response I see nothing but good coming from this project. No writers and no publishers are going to lose money. Sandra Langer: Membership Forum Response I don't think we can stop this any more than the music industry could but each download should cost and fees should go to creators! Marsha Lee Sheiness: Membership Forum Response Google just has no business copying someone's work without permission. Eugene Mirabelli's Membership Forum Response Google will make large sums of money through advertising on the archive site, but the writers of the copyrighted works will not receive a penny. Jesse Kornbluth's Membership Forum Response How dreary that book publishers, like the record companies, have taken a position which has already been proven to be short-sighted—and very much against the interests of writers. Thomas Hoobler: Membership Forum Response Don't let anybody fool you: the writer's greatest enemy is not Google; it's the publisher! Scott Walker: Membership Forum Response Book distribution is for people who read books; the system is also more or less broken. Roxana Robinson: Membership Forum Reponse If a published work is available for free in electronic form, in a process that eliminates the need for the physical object and circumvents licensing fees, the more the author's investment is vitiated... Rika Lesser: Membership Forum Response Whatever technologies are developed and however they continue to develop, the laws we have in place take precedence. Barbara Tedlock's Forum Response I think that my work will become better known and many folks will want to buy the books, if they like them. Lolette Kuby: Memership Forum Response Google would jeopardize the library system itself—the beginning of the end of the public library as we know it? Joanna Bankier's Membership Forum Response Intellectual property rights are a thing of the past; they were not formulated to meet the challenges of a global world of writers and readers. Robert Kelly: Membership Forum Reponse I write for you. Anything that makes you able to read me is a good thing...'whoever you are,' as great Whitman said. Home | Site Map | Copyright / Privacy Policy | Contact Us © 2004-2012 PEN American Center. All rights reserved.