This is a continuation of an earlier locked thread.
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/152603.html#id152603

Miguel Helft has another piece in The New York Times, titled
"Opposition to Google Books Settlement Jells".
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opposition-to-google-books-settlement/?em

I can't get over the audacity of the whole proposed settlement which, if passed unopposed, would curtail public access to "orphaned" books, rather than widden it. This passage from Helft's article is telling:

"[...] Pamela Samuelson, a well-known copyright expert at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, published a paper that is critical of the settlement for granting Google exclusive access to orphan works. Ms. Samuelson also points out that many authors of orphan works may want to grant far greater access to their own books that would be allowed by the settlement. “If asked, the authors of orphan books in major research libraries might well prefer for their books to be available under Creative Commons licenses or put in the public domain so that fellow researchers could have greater access to them,” Ms. Samuelson wrote. [...]"