Claiming a lengthy list of your books, short stories, essays, poems and articles for Google settlement benefits just got much easier. You can now start the process by simply submitting your bibliography to the claims administrator. You need only e-mail -- or send by regular mail -- a list of your books and shorter literary works (poems, short stories, articles) that may appear in books covered by the settlement. When in doubt, we suggest you submit everything.

Although the author's name and the title of the work is enough to get the ball rolling, it's helpful to include this additional information you can find in or on your books: ISBN, publisher, place and year of publication.

E-mail your bibliography to BookSettlement@RustConsulting.com. Feel free to send it as an attachment or paste it into the body of the e-mail itself.

The ramifications of the amended settlement for any one author and any one book are exceptionally complex. We've talked to our members, authors like yourself. The ones who got the notice found it incomprehensible and just shook their heads in confusion. Go to the settlement website's poorly implemented database and see for yourself how tricky this is -- has your book been scanned? Is it commercially available? Should you opt out? If you do nothing, you're automatically included in the settlement. If you opt out, Google doesn't even guarantee that it won't steal your work in the future.

It isn't fair. There are millions of book authors in this country who could be locked into an agreement they don't understand and didn't ask for. The Authors Guild represents only a tiny fraction of published writers, yet the new regulatory board set up in the proposed settlement will override individual book contracts -- not to mention common law and even the Constitutional protection of copyright. Mary Beth Peters, Register of Copyrights, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the settlement would "turn copyright on its head." Nothing in the revised U.S.settlement changes that.

I am not going to rehearse any arguments pro and anti the "Google settlement." You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can't. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle.

So, after being a loyal if invisible member for so long, I am resigning from the Guild. I am, however, retaining membership in the National Writers Union and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, both of which opposed the "Google settlement." They don't have your clout, but their judgment, I think, is sounder, and their courage greater.

Mian Mian, a 39-year-old author from Shanghai whose realistic descriptions of life with drugs and among prostitutes, gangsters and failed artists, has attracted a large following of young readers, is suing Google for alleged copyright infringement. Sun Jingwei, her lawyer, told the Financial Times that the Haidian People's Court in Beijing would start hearings on December 29.

The case, the first brought against Google by a Chinese writer, underlines the risks that remain to Google's plan to build a digital library which could lay the groundwork for an "iTunes of books" and potentially transform the publishing industry.

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Mian Mian filed her complaint on October 23. The author demands that Google apologises for scanning part of her works, deletes the scanned content from its digital library and pays her Rmb60,000 ($8,800) in compensation, Mr Sun said. He added that the plaintiff had collected evidence of scans of Mian Mian's novels that could be found online although a complete scan of one of her books had been removed in mid-November.

Although he did not name Google directly, Mr Sarkozy was thought to be alluding to the search giant, which has recently attracted criticism from authors, publishers and libraries for its plans to scan out-of-copyright books and make them digitally searchable online.

"We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is," said the French president. He told the audience at a public meeting that a French book digitisation project would be financed by a national loan. "We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language, just because we weren't capable of funding our own digitisation project," he said.

France is grappling with how best to manage the digital revolution, which is affecting everything from music to movies. The French prime minister, Francois Fillon, has established a commission to look at the best ways of insulating the publishing industry from the difficulties that faced the record labels and film studios, while still innovating in the internet age. He said that he wanted to avoid another cultural industry being "threatened by looting".

In an order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan granted preliminary approval to the pact and set Feb. 18 as the date for a fairness hearing on the settlement. Last week, Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers submitted a revised agreement that would allow Google to distribute millions of digital copies of books online, but narrowed the number of books covered by the pact.

The revised settlement was designed to allay concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice and others that the original pact granted broad rights and immunities to Google and was anti-competitive. The Justice Department said earlier this week that its review of the revised settlement and its probe into the agreement is ongoing.

The China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) believes Google scanned thousands of books, by over 500 Chinese authors, into its digital library without their permission or compensation, said spokesman Chen Qirong. "Whether you are a small company or big company you still need to respect the copyright of the authors," Chen said.

Google countered by saying it had received permission from over 50 Chinese publishers who allowed the U.S. search giant to digitize more than 30,000 books to be found through Internet searches and for preview. "We believe the book search complies with international copyright law," said Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne.

According to various reports Professor Roland Reuss, a literature professor from Germany's Heidelberg University, struck out at Google and the Settlement, negotiated in the US by the Association of American Publishers, and the US Authors Guild with Google. He described Google's lofty ideals as "just a whole garbage of hysterical propaganda", and warned of a threat to traditional publishing, saying "you revolutionize the market but the cost is that the producers of goods in this market will be demolished".

Reuss then rounded on Bertelsmann's Richard Sarnoff, who negotiated the deal as chair of the AAP, calling him "naive" and arguing that the deal disregarded the Berne Convention, and the rights of copyright holders to determine how their work was used. According to Publishers Weekly, Sarnoff said the parties to the deal did not anticipate the backlash in Europe. And he added that European works may indeed have to be removed from the settlement.

The parties in the Google Book Search Settlement have asked the court to adjourn the scheduled October 7th fairness hearing, telling the court the parties intend to amend the deal. "Because the parties, after consultation with the DOJ, have determined that the Settlement Agreement that was approved preliminarily in November 2008 will be amended, plaintiffs respectfully submit that the Fairness Hearing should not be held, as scheduled, on October 7," reads a memorandum appended to the parties motion to adjourn. "To continue on the current schedule would put the Court in a position of reviewing and having participants at the hearing speak to the original Settlement Agreement, which will not be the subject of a motion for final approval." The court is expected to grant the motion.

The memorandum notes that the parties met with senior DOJ officials on September 17, one day before the DOJ filed its brief with the court outlining a range of concerns with the current settlement agreement. "Of key importance is that the U.S. Statement of Interest confirmed the DOJ's reciprocal desire to work with the parties to address concerns," the memo states. "It is because the parties wish to work with the DOJ to the fullest extent possible that they have engaged, and plan to continue to engage, in negotiations in an effort to address and resolve the concerns expressed in the U.S. Statement of Interest." The parties reiterated their commitment to "rapidly advancing" discussions with the DOJ. The delay marks the second time the fairness hearing has been pushed back, the first time coming after lawyers for a group of authors led by Gail Steinbeck won a four month extension to the opt-out deadline.

"The news out of this is that there are frantic negotiations going on in back rooms right now," said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, which raised antitrust and other objections to the settlement. "The parties are scared enough to be talking seriously about changes, with each other and the government. The government is being the stern parent making them do it."

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The Justice Department's filing on Friday, echoing other critics, said that the settlement could give Google a virtually exclusive license to millions of out-of-print "orphan books," whose rights holders were unknown or cannot be found, making it impossible for anyone else to build a comparable digital library; the interests of some class members, including authors of orphan works and foreign authors, might not have been adequately represented; and the efforts to notify class members about the settlement might have been inadequate.

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Laying out a path forward, the department said some of its antitrust concerns could be mitigated by "some mechanism by which Google's competitors' could gain comparable access to orphan works." And it said that concerns about the fair representation of some authors could be addressed if some rights for Google to profit from out-of-print books were granted only if their authors agreed, rather than by default.

In addition to a heavy reading load for the court, the deal took another twist last week, this one political. At a September 10 hearing before the competition subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee U.S. Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters criticized the deal, telling lawmakers it was "fundamentally at odds with the law," and that it usurped a role occupied solely by Congress. Association of American Publishers' Allan Adler told PW he politely disagreed with Peters' assessment and said publishers would respond to Peters' more directly in their forthcoming brief to the court.

It remains to be seen, however, what if any interest beyond general oversight Congress has in looking at the deal at this late stage. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, suggested that Congress should stay away. "At this point, we don’t have a role to play," she said, adding that the settlement was “the private sector achieving what we failed to achieve" in terms of legislation. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, however, suggested that the settlement was a "classic case of legislating from the bench." Adler said he believes it is unlikely the hearing will result in any action, and that all parties will have to look to the court for a determination. Whether the court looks to the Copyright Office, meanwhile is another matter.

After Amazon came out against the Google Settlement earlier this week, the Authors Guild has come back with a letter slamming the e-tailer, claiming that "Amazon's hypocrisy is breathtaking." The Guild likened Amazon's control of bookselling and the up-and-coming e-book market to a choke-hold, noting that everyone is waiting for the moment when the company will stop selling e-books at a loss and start to "squeeze publishers and authors" when everyone is locked in to the Kindle. The Guild said that, sadly, the Google plan won't infringe on Amazon's control of the business: "Amazon needn't worry, really: this agreement is about out-of-print books. Its lock on the online distribution of in-print books, unfortunately, seems secure."

After a recent meeting of its delegates held in Chicago, the National Writers Union has announced its opposition to the Google Book settlement with NWU president Larry Goldbetter calling the proposed agreement, "grossly unfair to writers." Goldbetter said that "compared to the number and seriousness" of the copyright violations engaged in by Google in scanning copyrighted materials, the offer to pay writers between $60 and $300 for each book is "ridiculously low." That only $45 million out of the $125 million in the settlement is allocated to pay writers, "seems way short of the amount needed to compensate authors of millions of books," Goldbetter said.

The NWU also objects to the deal because it believes it is burdensome to require writers to opt out rather than having Google ask permission to use their material. Finally, the NWU said the settlement could interfere with the relationship between writers and their publishers. "The settlement makes assumptions about electronic rights that writers may or may not have assigned to publishers and it sets up an unfair binding arbitration process to resolve disputes between writers and publishers. These disputes must be arbitrated on a case-by-case basis. The settlement does not allow for writers, who were collectively targeted, to collectively negotiate to settle these disputes."

In a memo to clients obtained by The New York Times, William Morris advises writers to opt out of the settlement because it would "bind copyright owners in any book published prior to January 9, 2009 to its terms." The terms of the agreement call for authors and publishers to split 63 percent of any revenue that Google generates from the sale of a digitized book either individually or in a database, as well as ad revenues from pages where an author's work appears.

"Now they've got this license to sell your books at a pre-negotiated one-time royalty that you're stuck with unless a court changes the settlement," Eric Zohn, an attorney in business affairs at William Morris, said in an interview. "It's like a legislative change. Under copyright law, you don't have anything without express written consent from the copyright holder. Now the court is saying Google is free to sell your book unless you expressly tell them not to."

Mr. Zohn said that he was advising clients to allow Google to keep their digitized books in the Google's database so that the books may be searched. He said he had no problem with snippets of clients' works appearing in search results, and in fact believed that such uses would be largely beneficial to authors seeking publicity for their work.

Steinbeck, the driving force behind the extension, called the ruling great news. "We now have to time to really sink our teeth into what this agreement will mean," she said. She suggested that four months should be sufficient to determine whether changes made to the deal will make it more acceptable, or whether to opt out—or perhaps even object to the deal.

The Internet Archive (IA), which had a motion to intervene denied by Chin last week, also praised the decision. "We think this is very good news," IA's Peter Brantley told PW. "We are very interested in working with partners to...more squarely identify our concerns and articulate them to a broader audience."

Authors Guild president Paul Aiken shrugged off the extension. "We'd hoped for a shorter extension of time, since we’re eager to get on to the next phase of the process," he told PW. "It's not surprising, however. Nothing about this settlement has happened quickly."