The Authors Guild
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| Formation | 1912 |
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| Purpose | advocacy |
| Headquarters | New York, New York |
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Membership
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9000 |
| Website | authorsguild |
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Formerly called
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Authors League of America |
The Authors Guild is America's oldest and largest professional organization for writers and provides advocacy on issues of free expression and copyright protection. Since its founding in 1912 as the Authors League of America, it has counted among its board members notable authors of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including numerous winners of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards. It now has about 9,000 members, who receive free legal advice and guidance on contracts with publishers as well as insurance services and assistance with subsidiary licensing and royalties.
The group lobbies at the national and state levels on censorship and tax concerns, and it has initiated or supported several major lawsuits in defense of authors' copyrights. In one of those, a class-action suit claiming that Google acted illegally when it scanned millions of copyrighted books without permission, the Authors Guild lost on appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Recently the Authors Guild has fought the consolidation of the publishing industry through the mergers of large publishers, and it has pressed the publishers to increase royalty rates for ebooks.
The original Authors League of America was organized with headquarters in New York City in order "to protect the rights of all authors, whether engaged in literary, dramatic, artistic, or musical competition, and to advise and assist all such authors". In 1921, the Dramatists Guild of America split off as a separate group to represent writers of stage and radio drama. Past presidents of the Authors Guild have included the novelists Pearl S. Buck, Rex Stout and Madeleine L'Engle, the biographers Anne Edwards and Robert Caro, the journalists Herbert Mitgang and J. Anthony Lukas, and the historians William Shirer and Robert Massie. In 2014, the guild's members elected Roxana Robinson as president and Judy Blume, Richard Russo and James Shapiro as vice presidents.
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Wikipedia