The Shallows talks a lot about Google Books, and many of our books have addressed the issue of copyright. This is a really interesting article about "orphan books" and where they fall into this argument. (An orphan book is one that the copyright has not expired, but where they copyright holder is unknown or can't be found)
Larry Lessig's talk at CERN on the way that copyright interacts with science publishing is a stirring call-to-arms to free up scientific discovery and inquiry.