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)
This article is referenced in our current book about what the internet is doing to our thinking. It is written by Nicholas Carr who is also the author of our next book, The Shallows. It sounds like it will be a very interesting book.