AAP President Says Writers' Rights Under Fire

Posted on January 24, 2007

Publisher's Weekly reports on the speech given by Pat Schroeder, the President of the Association of American Publishers, at the Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association lunch. Schroeder warned that the rights of authors are in danger in the digital age.

The Association of American Publishers' fight to preserve copyright in the digital era as well as how the organization can battle illiteracy were the dominant themes of AAP president Pat Schroeder's speech yesterday before the Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association's January lunch.

Noting that she didn't take over the AAP "to watch the demise of publishing," Schroeder spoke candidly about the AAP's lawsuit against Google—it has sued the search engine for adding copyrighted books to its Google Library project without the permission of authors or publishers—and the importance of making sure content creators are included in profit models as publishing moves more and more to the Web. "It's a very serious time as we look at the digital environment we're in," she noted.

We also hope that Ms. Schroeder isn't going to preside over the demise of publishing. What a horrifying concept. Although if the AAP and other publishers don't win their copyright lawsuit against Google, it will set the stage for the possible destruction of the right of an author to own and control his own work. Which would be grim, indeed.

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