Scott Turow, a best-selling author and president of the Authors Guild, echoes publishing-house complaints.

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Michael Levin is an eight-time best-selling author, a former member of the Authors Guild Council and a business writer.

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The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild disagreed.

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The decision caps two years of painstaking negotiations between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (who had sued Google in 2005 over the project).

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We especially need the larger organisations, like the Society of Authors (9, 000 members) and the Authors Guild (8, 000 members), to take a stance and demand that Amazon act.

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In 2001, book authors and the Authors Guild filed a class-action lawsuit, as did publishers, alleging that Google had violated copyright laws by scanning books from the libraries of major universities without always getting permission from the copyright owners of the books.

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"I once had an argument with one of my publishers when I said, 'I've been publishing with you for a long time and you still don't know who buys my books, ' and he said, 'Well, nobody in publishing knows that, ' " says Mr. Turow, president of the Authors Guild.

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Just a couple weeks after the Authors Guild's overzealous copyright-maximalist stance forced the bookseller to modify the Kindle 2's text to speech feature, the company's lawyers have had a fit of irony and sent out a DMCA takedown request to MobileRead, claiming that the site's links to a Python script that enables Kindle owners to shop at Mobipocket-format ebook sites constitutes circumvention of the Kindle's DRM.

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