Update: A mother who went to trial after being asked to leave an Atlanta library because her baby was laughing too loud was found guilty of obstructing a police officer by the jury after a two hour deliberation. Police had video of her altercation with officers outside the library where she is clearly seen causing a public disturbance outside the library. She was sentanced to 12 months probation, anger management classes, and parenting classes. The mother, Donnetta Foster, had this to say:"I definitely feel like I stood up for myself today... I spoke out against what I felt was wrong." CBS AtlantaWhile I sympathize with Ms. Foster feeling wronged, I have the feeling she was led astray into going to trial. This all seems like she and her lawyer somehow felt this would shift blame and put the library on trial like a Hollywood movie twist when in fact all that was in question for the courts was if she did or did not yell at a police officer. There were many avenues she could have taken both on that day and after, but instead she chose to act rashly and now has a criminal charge on her record.
Update: In other news, the Author's Guild is getting many fingers waggled at them for suing universities for allowing Google to digitize their library's "orphaned" books. Orphaned books are books where the copyright holder cannot be located, and the universities felt that it had an obligation to keep these items in the public mind through digitization, many belonging in the HathiTrust. So far the Library Copyright Alliance has stepped up to call the Guild's lawsuit 'deplorable" while the Author's Guild has fired back that many of the claimed 'orphaned books' are not orphaned at all but the author's can be tracked down with a simple Google search. That's ironic in that many if not all of the items in the HathiTrust were scanned during the rocky Google Books project.