Maybe. I think that is a pretty optimistic view of congress and our political process. I would argue that having a powerful, rich company with a monopoly to lose would have made passing such a law less likely, not more.
I do think we would have been better off with a Google monopoly on unpublished unclaimed books than with the lack of access we have today.
The article says:
> You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.
If it's so easy, I'm suprised nobody has done it and accepted the consequences. It seems one of the largest single positive impacts any person could make on the world. Once it's released, it'll never go back in the box. A modern Pandora.