I think the answer is the same as for the question of why is copyright law so badly broken as to create a huge orphan works problem? I mean, there are easy twea

I think the answer is the same as for the question of why is copyright law so badly broken as to create a huge orphan works problem? I mean, there are easy tweaks to the copyright system that would alleviate the orphan works problem without interfering with the minuscule fraction of very old works that are still profitable. The answer in both cases is regulatory capture. The parts of the government that would deal with this have lots of interaction with publishers and authors lobbying them. And those groups hate all the digitization plans. From the perspective of a content producer, technology is the worst thing ever. Every year, technology advances and increases the number of ways that people can spend time not reading the works of any one author. A mass book digitization program would swamp the market with old books which means fewer sales for recently published books. It might allow people to get into hobbies that would sap up their time and prevent them from buying new books! Can you imagine if Wikipedia didn't exist? Think of the billions of person-hours that wouldn't have been spent reading and writing Wikipedia articles...that time would have gone somewhere, and part of it would certainly have been spent reading best seller books purchased at a book store.