As Mr. Knopf mentioned in the last panel, the courts don't always get it right, but I think in this case at least they moved towards an appropriate decision. The second half of that class action case is about to be settled, we hope, for about $5 million.
I did give the clerk some copies of the judgment in the first case, which was Robertson v. Thomson. That was about $11 million, and it did take a dozen years to do.
Ms. Robertson and PWAC and other organizations that were supporting that suit identified the fact that publishers were using electronic rights without permission, so of course the contracts now try to take our rights in perpetuity, for all purposes, for anything that has ever been invented. It's obviously up to us to stiffen our spines as the small business people that we are.
There's an imbalance in the negotiating power. We work on that in various ways. We'll form a union if we have to, but we'd rather come to terms with our partners in the industry on reasonable terms. It's an ongoing issue; I don't think anything you can do here will change that appreciably, but certainly we need to have that fundamental recognition for digital or electronic copies of our works. We need to have our rights in those works recognized, and some aspects of this bill obviously put that at threat.