> Dan Clancy, the Google engineering lead on the project who helped design the settlement, thinks that it was a particular brand of objector—not Google’s competitors but “sympathetic entities” you’d think would be in favor of it, like library enthusiasts, academic authors, and so on—that ultimately flipped the DOJ.

I was at Google in 2009 on a team adjacent to Dan Clancy when he was most excited about the Authors’ Guild negotiations to publish orphan works and create a portal to pay copyright holders who signed up, and I recall that one opponent that he was frustrated at was Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who filed a jealous amicus brief (https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yo...) complaining that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too. In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing which is what actually happened in the 15 year since then. Instead of one company selling out-of-print but in-copyright books, or multiple organizations, no one is allowed to sell them today.

Since then, of course, Brewster Kahle launched an e-library of copyrighted books without legal authorization anyway which will probably be the death of the current organization that runs the Internet Archive. Tragic all around.