the exclusive source for orphaned works

Nonsense. If Congress passed a law saying "hey, everyone, you all get the deal Google gets -- you can scan and sell e-books and post snippets etc. for all authors not on this blacklist, just send 63% of your profits to the following address", then there are lots and lots of people and groups who could do useful and interesting things with that ability, without spending hundreds of millions of dollars up front. (Obviously making this work in practice would be much more complicated, but the basic barrier to entry is not necessary.)

> You may not have thought about this, but...

Well... we're verging on incivility here and not convincing each other, so I'll just try to clarify my earlier comment and leave it at that.

By "shenanigans" I wasn't talking about Google; I was referring to our hypothetical group who created a class-action-sized civil wrong for the exclusive purpose of getting sued and then making a deal with the class representative because that's easier than finding all the actual members of the class and negotiating with them. My strong impression is that judges don't look kindly at people who try to manipulate the court system like that. (Google did something quite different: they started the book scanning project for independently worthy purposes, intended to defend it using traditional legal arguments like fair use, and then this deal fell in their laps and they're running with it.)

And fair call on the goalposts -- here's where I'm coming from. The part I find offensive about the settlement is that we're putting a private entity with a profit motive effectively in charge of determining the pricing and availability of orphan works, in a sort of compulsory licensing scheme. I'm all for orphan works being available, compulsory licensing is a plausible approach with a long history, but there are a lot of important interests here -- including the public good! -- and they aren't all represented by this private corporation + small industry trade group setup. If we want to fix this, it isn't really helpful if, I dunno, Microsoft goes and gets their own settlement. We would need someone with a broader mandate, representing librarians and the public and who-ever else. But, by definition, their primary concern would no longer be profit, so they probably couldn't monetize a settlement as well as Google, so why would the Authors Guild even talk to them?