The Canadian Writers Against Google Settlement (CWAG) has filed a series of objections to the proposed Revised Settlement. I found two of them especially interesting. You can find their full filing here.
… With respect to the problem of licensing the work of unlocatable copyright holders, we prefer the existing Canadian approach to a Google-run monopoly. An oft-repeated claim about the Amended Settlement is that it will allow the legal dissemination of copyrighted material for which an author cannot be found. The dissemination of these “orphan works” is indeed an important issue. However, Canadian copyright law already contains a mechanism for obtaining a license to disseminate works that have been orphaned by Canadian authors.[15] As such, the Amended Settlement is a duplicative and unjustified end-run around our domestic regime. …
Books from Canada, the UK and Australia have been swept into the Amended Settlement because they apparently share “a common legal heritage and similar book industry practices.”[16] In actual fact, Canada has unique cultural, linguistic, and juridical characteristics that differentiate Canadians from other members of the Author Sub-Class.
Canada is a bilingual country whose two official languages, French and English, are used by Canadians across the country. Canada is also a bi-juridical country where two legal systems exist side by side: civil law in Québec and common law in other Canadian provinces. The differences between the two traditions that Canada was built on are so profound that the Province of Québec is recognized as a distinct society within Canada. …
