Your essay is very good, and makes all of the necessary points and distinctions.

If I might just make a little comment: Reuss completely conflates two completely independent issues: (1) 3rd-party scanning, storing and displaying, by google, of authors’ non-give-away books, without their consent, and (2) Open Access, in which authors, by choice, give away their own give-away writings (mainly refereed-journal articles) for free online.

I think it is a big mistake to treat these two very different (and in many ways even opposite) things jointly in any way. On the contrary, all the focus in correcting Reuss’s silly polemics should be on pointing out that what he says indifferently about both google books and Open Access in fact has *nothing whatsoever to do with Open Access*. This is the most important (and most misunderstood) PostGutenberg distinction: http://cogprints.org/1639/1/resolution.htm#1.1

You play into Reuss’s hands (and you keep the vast, ignorant majority in their state of total confusion) by speaking about these two things in the same breath (even though what you say is correct, or at least arguable). If you wish to engage Reuss on google book-scanning, by all means do — but only after completely dissociating it from Open Access. (I would say also vice-versa, except that Reuss clearly has no clue at all, and nothing to say, about Open Access: He simply does not know what it is about, or for. Hence that is all one can say to him on that score, by way of response!)

(I branch this to Ebs Hilf and some other OA-savvy German colleagues who will perhaps be willing to make this point publicly.)

Beste Gruesse,

Stevan

PS Needless to say, I think it is a great mistake to conflate these two things together under the rubric of “copyright issues” too.