Remember Milli Vanilli? In 1990, after the group garnered the year's "Best New Artist" award, the prize was revoked. To no one's real surprise, it was discovered that the duo, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, had not performed the vocals on their album. Despite selling ten million records and producing five Top Five singles (including three Number One's), the group's putative misrepresentation of their own contributions to their music made them targets of a class-action suit. Purchasers of the band's smash album, Girl You Know It's True, were eventually offered a rebate.

Ten years later, here we are — boogying in the bitstream to ambient techno, downloading MP3s, and ripping custom CDs. Here we are — ordering long out-of-print books from e-commerce-enabled databases like bibliofind.com or even ordering perfectly bound reprints of these books with an Internet-based print-on-demand service. Questions of intellectual property are getting much nervous press, but the really astonishing fact is that before a federal judge pulled the plug, napster.com boasted a user-base of 22 million. A Volkswagen postcard that I found recently stations a guy at a turntable beside a bevy of attractive women and a VW; the caption reads: used is good. As physical objects like books and CDs funnel ever faster into the Web's phantasmagoria, a static regime of property, based on absolute ownership of an original, seems poised to cede to one of circulation, recombination, access, and speed. Everyone is Milli Vanilli now.

With this in mind, what does it mean for a book to be "out-of-print" in a universe composed less of ink on paper than of bits in motion. Rooting around Bruce Sterling's Master List of Dead Media, I was impressed by the sheer variety of message-bearing materials that humans have used over the course of millennia. From clay tablet to wax cylinder to string and yarn, we seem to have a talent for making records. But an out-of-print book is a very special kind of record: to be blunt, it's a record that no one wants to buy. Should it be relegated to the dustbin? No, say the new print-on-demand entrepreneurs. Somebody, somewhere, might want to buy that book; he or she just doesn't know it yet. Suddenly, out-of-print is pure marketing problem. The distribution and warehousing are all taken care of, thanks to the magic of — you guessed it — the Internet. Yet, this pretty picture — no book without a buyer, no pulping, a perfectly efficient book-publishing system — has a less charming flip-side: copyright.

I want to focus on the relationship between "out of print" and the question — ever more vexed — of intellectual property and especially copyright. Currently, the legal discourse on the status of intellectual property in a world of ubiquitous digitization is deeply intertwined with nervous chattering in the publishing industry over the fate of books in a digital world. One need only review Publishers' Weekly's e-publishing coverage, which for the past year has veered wildly between anxiety and jubilation, to understand how much is at stake for publishers and writers now that everything and nothing are potentially "in print" — and how opposed, at bottom, those interests are.

The categories of "in print" and "under copyright" have long interlocked in the publishing's history. In The Nature of the Book, Adrian Johns' monumental history of the book trade in early modern England, we learn that a manuscript with the author's ink still wet was not yet a "copy." When stationers (a catchall term designating all men and women associated with the book trade, including printers and booksellers) used the word "copy," they meant not only the pile of handwritten sheaves in all its inkstained glory, but also everything that the work in question could be, once the volume was published. The word "copy" connoted futurity and investment, a stake in the work's fate. Johns suggests that this concept formed the nugget of a system "capable of protecting the investment of time and money made by a Stationer in transforming the corrupt, singular manuscript into the printed title." If Johns is right, modern copyright law insists on what has always been obvious from a publisher's point of view: that the process of publication adds value to a manuscript. To abolish any residual doubts about this added value, one need only reflect of how much is spent on the publication process — from editing, proofing, and printing to marketing and promotion. When copyright reverts to an author, what becomes of this added value?