the problem of excessive accessibility (random rant and call to debate)
this is an issue that increasingly comes up in copyright law, and in relation to privacy.
As it was put in the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter, "the problem of excessive accessibility arises when somebody thinks certain information should be hard to find, even if by law or policy it has to be made public or available to those who need it."
The Free Online Scholarship newsletter has raised the issue in relation to criminal records, phone numbers, and information that might be useful to terrorists, and in the april issue looked at the complaint by the Authors Guild (reported here in Wired) that Amazon sells used books on the same page as new books (when people buy the used books, the author gets no royalties).
perhaps you could also argue the same issue was lurking in the Salinger v Random House case (811 F 2d 90 (1987)) - that famous old copyright case about J D Salinger's letters - held in libraries but sought to be used by a biographer (who of course had actually gone and found all the letters of the letters in the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Texas, to which they had been donated by the recipients or their representatives.) - although I'm sure J D Salinger would have preferred the letters weren't available in the libraries, either!)
one has a sense that copyright is often used to the same end - to restrict accessibility even of documents that are publicly available somewhere. Sometimes this is of course based purely on the profit motive - which is legitimate under basic suppositions of copyright law - and sometimes it is for reasons less intrinsic to copyright law. The trend in copyright law also is to give copyright owners the right to control each 'access' to a work - generally, on the basis that each access generates a copy and that copy is protected (this may not be the effect of the Sony decision, but that does, after all, turn on a quite restrictive view of what a 'copy' is).
thinking aloud then, perhaps we need more of a debate on this problem of 'excessive accessbility'. I don't know whether the debates that have come up in the privacy area are relevant here, but my gut tells me there are some cross-issues. Salinger v Random House; Harper & Row - all had some concept that copyright owners had a right of first publication, but thereafter their control was more limited (to reproduction, selling copies, performances). controlling each publication, on the other hand, is much more restrictive. We've had this debate in the copyright literature (eg litman, the exclusive right to read) but isn't it interesting to see it come up in other contexts, and this amazon context?