The Guardian has a long and fascinating opinion piece by author John Lanchester on copyright in the Google Age. Lanchester surveys the history of copyright, the influence of corporations in modern copyright law, and how Google Booksearch is changing how we think about ownership of book content:
The corporations have the power, and they are not afraid to use it. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US considerably extended the range of both criminal and civil offences that could be committed over copyright issues. There is a clause in US film contracts which awards the producers rights "in perpetuity and throughout the universe and for any and all forms of expression whether now existing or hereafter devised". As far as I can tell, the only loophole in that is if you fell through a crack in the space-time fabric of the universe into a parallel one...
...There is an irony here. Twenty years ago, the US studios announced that the end of civilisation as we know it was at hand; the destructive force was the video-cassette recorder. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, went before Congress and said that "The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." Today, revenue from video rentals accounts for 46.6% of all the money earned by the major studios.
Definitely well worth a read. One can't help but see PoD technology becoming the obvious route for the 80% of all books which are out-of-print which Google are trying to scan into their program. If they reimburse authors properly, it could change the way current author contracts are written...