The United States Copyright Office is weighing in on the Google Books/Authors Guild settlement controversy. From Yahoo! News and Reuters:

Google Inc's plan to digitize millions of books as part of a class action settlement wrongly creates a virtually compulsory license for books, the U.S. register of copyrights said on Thursday.

A U.S. court has imposed a preliminary injunction against the publication of an unauthorized sequel to J.D. Salinger's classic Catcher in the Rye. Salinger is suing the author of the sequel for copyright infringement, and sought to stop publication of the work until the copyright case can be heard. The sequel's author is appealing the injunction.

More details are available at The Book Blog.

I can't proclaim any special significant knowledge of the legal system or whether Google's plan to create a digital library from copyrighted material is a detriment to authors and publishers. The Writer Beware blog has a good account of one author who opted out of the now famous Google Books Search settlement and her reasons for doing so.

It's not the display of bibliographic information, or even snippets, that I object to--it's the possible uses the settlement empowers Google to make of my work down the road (including selling my books in electronic and POD form). If those uses were limited and clearly defined, I might not have a problem--but they aren't, and I just can't see allowing such a sweeping license to my work, where the implications of granting that license are so unclear.

Some months ago (about six, to be precise), I submitted an application with the United States Copyright Office to obtain a registered copyright for my time travel-related novella Timecast. According to the Copyright Office website, it takes an average of four months to procure the copyright and receive the copyright certificate in the mail.