One part of the business model that old media has always relied on is the fact that they can sell you things more than once. Watch it in the theater, buy the dvd, watch it on broadcast… there are all sorts of ways to continue to derive income from something they produce. Or in some cases, make sure something is only available once; that way they don’t have to compete against their own product. Controlling scarcity looked like it would work forever, and may would have, if video services like YouTube had not got in the way. Another thing you don’t want to have to compete with if you are a content producer is the public domain. There is still one scarce resource and that is time. If people are finding other things to watch, that is not a good thing. So, is it in your best interest to make it hard for Google to make books searchable? Of course. Is it a key strategy to make copyright so onerous that YouTube accidentally removes things that are no longer under copyright? You bet. As clueless as we all like to think “old media” is, I really wonder sometimes if we don’t underestimate them.