Advocates of open access to orphan works cheered the rejection of the settlement, saying it could pave the way for legislation that would let anyone — not just Google — use the books..
“If Congress can wake up to the importance of this issue, there’s a good chance they will pass orphan books legislation, and they will do so in the interest of the general public, not favoring any enterprise,” said Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library
Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn't especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It's recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared.