OCLC has announced the beta release of their copyright evidence registry. From their PR:

The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry is a community working together to build a union catalog of copyright evidence based on WorldCat, which contains more than 100 million bibliographic records describing items held in thousands of libraries worldwide. In addition to the WorldCat metadata, the Copyright Evidence Registry uses other data contributed by libraries and other organizations.

Digitization projects continue for books in the public domain, but books whose copyright status is unknown are destined to remain in print and on shelves until their status can be determined. The process to determine copyright status can be lengthy and labor intensive. The goal of the Copyright Evidence Registry is to encourage a cooperative environment to discover, create and share copyright evidence through a collaboratively created and maintained database, using the WorldCat cooperative model to eliminate duplicate efforts.

This is a good effort, although there are some obvious concerns and issues. Molly Kleinman at the Univ. of Michigan notes:

1. OCLC claims and enforces copyrights in its bibliographic records. While it grants member libraries permission to make broad use of those records, my understanding is that the same is not true for non-members. If OCLC extends that policy to the Copyright Evidence Registry, it risks becoming just another walled garden that is useful only to a select (and paying) group of members, and less useful even to that group than it would be if it were truly open.

2. Right now the registry is sparsely populated. It will take a critical mass of records and contributors to become a trustworthy source of copyright evidence. Where will that critical mass come from? What is OCLC doing to build it quickly? How will users know when the registry has reached it?

And Martyn Daniels is also rightfully concerned that this would be bounded by libraries, and not inclusive of publishers, who actually hold much of the rights data that is out there for books:

Unfortunately it is librarian and library based and these are not the rights owners nor party the rights acquired or available for sale they can only record the status of the rights as they know them. OCLC even state, ‘The rules will help libraries analyze the information available in the Copyright Evidence Registry and form their own conclusions about copyright status.’

I had a long talk with Bill Carney yesterday at OCLC; Bill is the "owner" of this product. Although OCLC is concerned about the sustainability of this service, I stressed the need for an open and free api that would permit use of the contents of the registry by any (machine) comer, providing at least essential rights information; perhaps through payment tiers, OCLC could offer fuller, more complete data, for example, the inclusion of rights-holder provided notes.

Bill was definitely supportive of such an api, and is actively soliciting feedback from others about the registry's desired functionality.  An api (of any sort) does not yet exist, but OCLC has discussed its need, and is giving it at least a modest priority (lagging, I believe, behind constructing the necessary authorization infrastructure for user-submitted write updates). If you wish to provide feedback to OCLC, it can be left at the OCLC CER website.

There are myriad issues with this registry, of course. I did raise the publisher buy-in issue, as has Martyn, and OCLC does not yet perceive how to encourage publishers to participate en masse, although Bill reiterated his strong willingness to engage them in a conversation; he also perceives that there might be a place for a conversation with the Authors' Guild, noted after one author contacted them about a metadata error (title/author). OCLC would love to receive -- from any willing publisher -- bulk records for reversions and other critical rights profiles; these data are either entirely missing or nearly so from the registry. (Update: I have since learned that the AG's director has now been directly notified of the copyright evidence registry by a publishing industry consultant). 

Another issue is that there is no provision for embedded rights, and afaik, the foreign rights issues are avoided, although there is no reason they could not also be recorded.  OCLC is also considering other forms of content, although for many different reasons, book content has pre-eminence for them.

Although I have had various fruitful conversations recently with a variety of organizations about more general rights registries, including some hopeful starts with Creative Commons, there is nothing else close to being a living service at this point, and OCLC deserves both encouragement and engagement; I have pledged my organization's support - the Digital Library Federation - to their effort, in whatever forms make sense for both of our respective organizations and memberships.

In the absence of energectic and diverse participation, over (at very least) the category of possibly-orphan books, there is a real danger of rights resolutions becoming too easily the intellectual property of large dominant actors, such as Amazon or Google. This would be particularly likely if there is a settlement in the AAP/AG v. Google suits, creating an ensuing landrush on these titles by publishers and authors to determine rights holders.

Whatever Google (particularly) might provide in reassurance, I would dearly love to aid any guarantee that these rights data remain available to the commonweal, and not solely to the corporation most advantaged by their resolution. A public statement of commitment by both Google and Amazon that essential rights data will be shared with the public would be quite helpful.