Technological change (i.e. innovation) continues and will transform IP law/practice. Here is a new one, a book scanner ("ripper") for the individual, the next step up from Amazon's Kindle, a hand-held reader of already digitized books link here.

The first review of the Atiz BookSnap aptly describes it as clunky -- "an ominous three-foot-high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade -- looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold the pages down during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (around $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly."

But someone is bound to improve it. And so what Google has been doing, digitizing the world's libraries, will become mainstream, creating competitive pressures on book publishers that will both greatly lower the price of books and put the industry on the defensive.