Annalee Newits at io9 has put together a long, detailed narrative of just what the Google Book Settlement might mean to you, me, Ursula le Guin, and the author of hypothetical '50s-era pulp series Journey To My Tentacle Cave. There are certainly more angles to this than I was aware of. On one hand, it can give forgotten works a new lease on life and their authors new means to market and profit from them; on another, the legal language is suspiciously sloppy. A new "Registry" would mediate licensing fees for authors of the scanned works; but that registry would be staffed by "copyright maximalists" from the Author's Guild and the American Association of Publishers. It's long, but well worth a read if you are at all concerned about the issue. 

(Thanks to Frank Glover, who posted this to our Google Group.)