Kevin Kelly has a big article on digitizing books in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. He wades into the swamp of intellectual property issues resulting from Google’s Book Search efforts.

He also fleshes out the copyright “orphan” issue, at least 75% of the books in contention in Google’s scanning effort are works that have been pretty much left for dead by the publishing industry: books that are out of print, with unclear copyright status, an unknown rights holder, & are basically unavailable to most readers.

The publishing industry is of course trying to extort money for works that they’ve already abandoned.

There are important decisions happening every day (Net Neutrality, The recent Supreme Court/eBay decision, the EFF’s suit against AT&T) that will impact the digital environment, access to information, privacy, etc. I don’t think we talk/think/debate about them often enough.