OK, call me a hopeless capitalist but the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) idea he proposes will not work, only companies at the scale of Google will be able to tackle the overhead involved and be willing to walk the associated minefield.<p>The opinions on this issue that I have read generally range from the gung-ho "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this should be done" to the somebody else's problem philosophy "This is a job for government/congress/etc.". The judge's written opinion is the latter.<p>Darnton says "This provision made Google and its partners effective proprietors of works they had not created." This, I believe, is the major roadblock for many (old-fashioned) creators: you are making money off from poor writers. Advocates of this approach fail to acknowledge the immense costs of creating and maintaining such a system. And how much money do the authors of orphan works make now? <i>Zero dollars</i>.<p>The European efforts cited are AFAIK were reactionary to Google's scanning program. One should remember that not all such grandiose European programs work (e.g. what happened to Galileo GPS system?) because of the major fracturing, e.g. France's Gallica has ~1.7M books but they seem to be mostly old, out of copyright works.
Copyright holders should be obliged to register their works after 10 years and every 10 years thereafter or so. The list of the registrations should be publicly accessible on the internet. If they can't be bothered to do it, the works should slip into the public domain.<p>And I speak as someone who makes his living from copyrighted works.
James Grimmelmann's got an excellent analysis of the Google Books opinion at <a href="http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chins_opinion" rel="nofollow">http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chin...</a>
This article should have been named 'Six Reasons Why Google Books Does Not Satisfy My Needs'. I beleive Books are a constant source of revenue for Google, and let's be honest, that is the only reason for corporations to exist.<p>Oh, btw Goole Books snippets are getting injected into my search results more and more often, so it looks like the idea of searching through the books isn't dead at all.
The way for Google to solve this issue is to just do like any other company out there and sign agreements with authors and publishers. They will never get the "orphan" works, but who cares? There are many more books that "will" be published then what "has been" published.