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The Register is not exactly an unbiased news source, it's more a "bitter cynical IT guy" website. IIRC Orlowski is kind of a cranky guy as well.
From what I can tell, this is France's solution to the "orphan works" / out-of-print problem. It's not quite as broad a "land grab" as Orlowski suggests, since he somehow forgot to mention the law only applies to out-of-print books, that authors/publishers receive payment, and they can pull their books from the system -- provided they make a digital version available in a reasonable time frame.
Also, in theory this will result in improved access to a large number of out-of-print works and payments for those works going to the authors and/or publishers. That's not exactly a bad thing.
Resolving this problem is going to stomp all over the toes of the people whose works are already out of print. There will be no perfect solution to this problem, because various parties' interests do not align perfectly; and every nation is likely to handle it differently.
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