A good argument against opt-in in the Google Print discussions over on the O’Reilly Radar:
Put another way, if the AAP and Author’s Guild were to prevail, and opt-in were required, the AAP is asking us to believe that publishers are willing to unearth the contracts for more than 25 million books, track down the authors (since many of those books surely don’t grant electronic rights to the publishers, since those rights weren’t even conceived at the time many of those contracts were signed), and get their permission to opt them in, and this despite the fact that those 25 million books didn’t sell even one copy in 2004. Try to be serious. There is no economic incentive for publishers to opt in books in what I’ve called “the twilight zone.” This approach will make the creation of a comprehensive search engine for books virtually impossible. ¹
#Copyright