The Biographical Dictionary of Authors Guild Insiders: Jan Constantine

As a follow-up to the Authors Guild’s anti-Amazon Who Moved My Button? project, an ill-conceived attempt to monitor the book & e-book policies of the Internet retailing giant, I thought it would be beneficial to compile The Biographical Dictionary of Authors Guild Insiders. The “insiders” are those senior staff members who worked in smoke-filled backrooms with the Guild's publishing allies to craft a legal agreement to sell the copyrighted works of tens of thousands of non-Guild writers to Google for $125 million. Since I have already compiled a biographical sketch of Guild executive director Paul Aiken, here is the entry for Jan Constantine:

General Counsel Jan Constantine, a 1973 graduate of The National Law Center, George Washington University, who oversaw the settlement on behalf of the Guild. Ms. Constantine brought deep legal and business experience to this task. Ms. Constantine had been employed as an attorney with the federal government for 10 years at the Federal Trade Commission and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, before taking a position with publishing conglomerate Macmillan, Inc., where she worked for 10 years, rising to the position of Deputy General Counsel. Ms. Constantine then worked for 14 years as Executive Vice President and Senior Deputy General Counsel of News America, the U.S. subsidiary of News Corporation, where she was in charge of U.S. litigation, First Amendment matters, and intellectual property mergers and acquisitions, among other responsibilities.

Note: Information taken directly from legal documents posted on The Public Index, a website devoted to the proposed Google Book Settlement (GBS). A federal judge is scheduled to approve or disapprove the proposed revised settlement (GBS 2.0) in the near future.