Just going back to this and relating to something I heard on the World Service a week or two back, when I woke up and couldn't get back off to sleep. I suddenly remembered it today, and thought I would investigate. Absolute sod to find, and copyright law is fiendishly complicated, but fortunately I did find a small paragraph in a wikipedia article which related back to the bit that I heard - the article is here
It relates to the possibility of digitising written works being exempt from copyright law. Apologies if you already know and have discounted it. This is the extract:-