New authors alliance wants to ease some copyright rules

Pamela Samuelson and Molly Van Houweling quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, May 31, 2014

“Copyright law is so strict, stretching up to 95 years from publication in some cases, that without the right to digitize it we are in jeopardy of losing our long-term cultural and intellectual history,” said alliance founding member Pamela Samuelson, a UC Berkeley law professor who filed briefs on Google’s behalf during the eight-year book scanning controversy.

“It’s not only academic writers who are running into problems,” said alliance founding member and UC Berkeley law Professor Molly Van Houweling, “It’s biographers and researchers and journalists and literary writers.”