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The cover story in today’s New York Times magazine is “Scan This Book” by Kevin Kelly. It’s an important step forward in the debate over copyright in orphan works — those works whose copyright owner cannot be found. Kelly argues that availability for searching should be part of the copyright bargain:

Search opens up creations. It promotes the civic nature of publishing. Having searchable works is good for culture. It is so good, in fact, that we can now state a new covenant: Copyrights must be counterbalanced by copyduties. In exchange for public protection of a work’s copies (what we call copyright), a creator has an obligation to allow that work to be searched. No search, no copyright. As a song, movie, novel or poem is searched, the potential connections it radiates seep into society in a much deeper way than the simple publication of a duplicated copy ever could.

I don’t agree with nearly everything Kelly says; I think he overstates the utility and primacy of search and pays too little attention to books as a social practice rather than as an information technology. But I cannot disagree with his central thesis — that industries and laws founded on the scarcity of the copy will yield to those based on the connections between works.