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Not long ago, I became obsessed with a book of poems by Thomas James, called Letters to a Stranger. The poems were brilliant and uncanny, magical and beguiling. They were also out-of-print. I read them in a kind of samizdat xerox passed around by the poet Lucie Brock-Broido. They did not exist in book form, as I recall, because no one could find James' relatives in order to get permission to publish the poems. Just last year, these poems were finally published, and an underground classic became available in print.
I mention this because James's book is a type of "orphaned" book that Google is claiming it would one day have had the right to publish, had James's relatives never been found. At least, that's what this post over at BoingBoing says. The back story is this: As you may remember, many writers were happy when the Author's Guild and Google finally reached a settlement over Google Book Search, which authors had claimed infringed upon their rights. (See here for more.) But as the BoingBoing post notes, the settlement has a funny loophole: It apparently allows for Google to take over rights of books whose authors have died, disappeared, or can't be found. As I understand it, in the past the rights to some of these books would have returned to the public domain; now they will go to...Google. The brilliant Lewis Hyde is protesting here.