Whether one chooses to define ownership of content through copyright (treating creative output as an object to be owned and bought and sold by a defined party over a specified period of years), or through the European model of “moral rights” (permanently and indelibly linking the author or artist to the work of art s/he created), more and more, the whole semantics of creative intentionality and meaning are called into question in cyberspace.

An article, a book, these are things in themselves, with beginnings, middles, and ends. But constellations of chunked-up, kinetic, hyperlinked, multiauthored, google-ad-enriched content clusters may convey an imaginative reality far different from that which any of the authors of the single chunks of content envisioned. And judiciously placed advertisements, colors and fontings, juxtapositions with other content chunks or ads, can create nuances and meanings the original authors never intended.

As we revisit our copyright and moral rights laws, we need to be mindful of one of the first intentions of copyright: the protection of a reader’s right to know the origins and authorship — the authenticity — of content.

I attended my first New England Independent Booksellers (NEIBA) conference in Hartford the other weekend, where many participants bemoaned the drop in the number of attendees. Some said the show used to be twice as big, say ten years ago, when there were many more independent bookstores. Apparently it was much more vital then, before the economy tanked, and the bookselling business started to be dominated by the chains and boxes, and online giants like Amazon.

This made me think that things really not are as they seem: just as Amazon is not really a bookstore after all (they can afford to treat books with all their rich metadata as loss leaders, while aggregating the *real* prize, their buyer profiles), so is the *real* value in an independent bookstore not in the physical book at all, but in what the customer gets for “free” — the knowledge of the bookseller or clerk. That human interface, the local person who reads voraciously and can effectively build a bookstore responsive to a community’s need to know and appetite for literature, who can recommend books to familiar customers, is one wetware casualty of the online chain store revolution that will be most difficult to replace with software, no matter how user friendly.

“Americans shoot first, ask questions later,” said the moderator of one panel discussion on the Google settlement held at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, reflecting widespread sentiment among non-US-based publishers and agents. “You Americans are all asleep,” noted one agent to me. “Why are you allowing this takeover of the publishing industry by a .com technology company?” Despite its industry-changing goal of creating the first and comprehensive global online library/bookstore out of the 10 million books it has scanned so far, Google had no on-the-floor presence at Frankfurt, the largest book fair in the world and the meeting point for the industry every October. (As of this date, Google has also not taken space at the London Book Fair for April 2010; in earlier years, it had taken out large stand space.) As one publisher put it, “Google is the shark swimming above our heads this year.” The Google settlement, supported by both Google and the AAP (Association of American Publishers), is currently being adjudicated in the USA; the US Department of Justice urges the court to reject the settlement in its current form. Many anticipate that this suit may result in a major challenge to existing copyright and moral rights legislation, ultimately redefining the digital realities of intellectual property.