You may want to look at the infringement of copyright lawsuit against Google and the proposed settlement. Basically Googles business model says "we will take everything in existence and make it available online. Please send us a form and opt out if that isn't OK with you!"
It includes a book registery, and an "orphan works" provision. Sound familiar?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10262203-93.html"its Google Book Search project is certainly among the company's top projects when it comes to chutzpah.... The settlement, if approved, could neatly cut a Gordian knot of copyright entanglements though setting Google back $125 million. That's because it would enable Google not only to display books that are out of copyright and those that are in print by cooperating publishers, as it does today, but also those from the vast collection of in-copyright brooks that are out of print--even when those holding rights to those books didn't specifically agree to Google's plan.
It took months to hammer out the proposed settlement, which runs to 320 pages including 15 appendices. Among its key features is the establishment of a Book Rights Registry, run by authors and publishers to keep track of who owns rights to which books and to collect money from Google's online sale of those books, either through individual use or through institutional subscriptions. For orphaned works, the registry would keep money from online sales for later distribution to rightsholders that turn up later.
The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard estimates this latter category accounts for 70 percent of Google Book Search books, and it's a key factor for so-called orphan works--books or other materials whose authors can't be located. The settlement would grant Google rights to use those works, but competitors--Microsoft, Amazon, or the Internet Archive are all real possibilities--without their own handy class-action settlement would be have to try to seek such permission in advance"
Google, seeing lemons in the form of the Authors Guild's a class-action lawsuit, ended up with lemonade in the settlement. Class-action settlements apply to a class of potential plaintiffs, and in the case of Google Book Search, those with rights to books must opt out of the settlement if they don't want to be a party to it. That means essentially that Google would be permitted to show content from in-copyright, out-of-print books and sell online copies of those books even without an explicit agreement with the books' rightsholders."
Objections?
""Under the actual law, it is Google's burden and not yours to ask you for permission and then fairly negotiate terms of contract acceptable to you personally, not jam some monstrosity down your throat," said Lynn Chu, a literary agent with Writers' Reps who also called the proposed settlement a "ripoff for authors" in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
"The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company," Harvard professor and author Robert Darnton concluded in a New York Review of Books opinion.
The original lasuit was recently joined by some photographers organizations.
The newest dispute in the Author’s Guild Google Book Settlement suit (previous post from 3/12/2010) arrived on April 7 when a coalition of photographers and illustrators led by the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), Graphic Artists Guild, the North American Nature Photography Association, the Professional Photographers of America, and represented by Mishcon de Reya New York LLP filed suit against Google, Inc., in the Southern District of NY, claiming that visual artists suffer distinct and separate infringements of their copyrights in their visual works (defined as “original visual works such as photographs, illustrations, graphic art, and other visual art”) embedded in books subject to Google’s Book Search by (1) scanning and creation of a digital copy (2) storing, and (3) distributing and publicly displaying the visual works.http://www.ipadrblog.com/2010/04/articles/...visual-artists/
