Cory Doctorow has an interesting piece about the Google Book Search settlement over at Boing Boing:
Writing on O'Reilly Radar, preeminent legal scholar Pamela Samuelson cuts through the distractions associated with the Google Book Search/Authors Guild settlement and goes right to the heart of the matter: Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.
The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.
...By design or by accident, Google got the most reactionary elements in publishing to anoint Google the Eternal God-Emperor of Literature. Thanks a lot, Authors Guild -- with friends like you, who needs piracy?
Some good insights in there that are worth contemplating.