I believe people should have to pay for copyrighted work.
Fine. That's not the question, though--the question is *which uses* of copyrighted works should people have to pay for?
The Lord of the Rings movies required payment to whoever inherited Tolkien's rights.
The warehouses worth of epic fantasy written since then required none.
That's a lot of money people who got paid for stuff that wouldn't have existed without Tolkien having set pen to paper.
Most of us would argue that's a reasonable trade off: Tolkien didn't get everything he could be said to have deserved, but there was also a lot of interesting and creative work done that wouldn't have been if it all had to go through the bottleneck of his heirs.
they would be making money (or increasing value) by using my work and not paying me for it.
That happens all the time. For-profit institutions have libraries too. The price I paid for one measly copy of K&R doesn't begin to approach the value of the income I've received from what I've learned from it.
Again, for me it comes down to weighing practical consequences: how much income are authors going to give up, versus what kinds of services are no longer going to be possible?
Yes, tracking down the owner of "orphaned" works... will be problematic. And there's the problem of reaching an older generation of copyright holders.... But this is Google we are talking about.... I'm sure they can figure it out.
How?
A big university library has around 10 million books. Google claims a goal of scanning 130 million. There are something like a million more published a year.
Forget orphaned work or hard-to-reach authors; just consider authors that still individually hold rights to their books. How do you get legal permission from millions of them, at a per-book cost (I'm not even talking about the licensing; just the labor cost to contact them and verify that they agreed) that makes the whole project feasible?
And once you do, what do you actually expect to actually wring out of them for your 10 millionth (or whatever it works out to be) of the advertising income due to google books?
Hey, I'm just hand-waving here myself, but my intuition here is that if we require opt-in, we're just not going to get anything like Google books in our lifetimes, if ever.