Congress Considers Reform On Orphaned Works

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate to liberalize copyright law in the case of orphaned works. The almost-identical bills would limit the penalties for infringement in cases where the copyright holder could no longer be identified. The idea is that one could declare their intent to use the work with the Copyright Office and if the copyright holder didn't care to respond, they would only be able to get 'reasonable compensation' instead of excessive statutory penalties. Public Knowledge has more details on the bills."

Comments

Re:Reasonable Compensation

[cpt kangarooski]

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

That's the problem with Berne and TRIPS. They've tied the baby and the bathwater together (not that there's really much that's worthwhile in either) with the idea that since no one would give up the former, they could greedily push through the latter. The thing is, the latter's become so damn onerous that it has encouraged many that the former just isn't worth the trouble any longer.

Not such a good idea anyway. The U.S. benefits far more from international harmonization than anyone else.

Yeah, but the US is big enough that we can get away with it. We've been outside of Berne before, and there's enough dissatisfaction with these (quite a bit of it caused by our own USTR) that if we adopted an isolationist, unilateral policy, others would likely follow. My main point is that I don't want minimum standards, and I don't want the hassle of reciprocity, but I do want national treatment. If some country out there is happy with life+50, then good for them. I won't tell them what to do. But I don't want that here.

On top of that, TRIPS is not self-executing.

Yes, but you can easily get into a fix with the President and the Senate binding the US, even if the House doesn't want to support the enabling legislation. They didn't; the whole system failed, but it was still a deliberately sneaky thing to do, and the tactic continues to be employed.

Participating in the established process

There is no established process. The terms never go down, and Berne never gets better. Cutting the Gordian knot is the only way.