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:The flaw is internet anonymization.

[Hatta]

Want to ruin some bureaucrat's day? Let's find out if goatse is copyrighted.

Re:Just making it easier for big corps...

[ejecta]

Yep, and then it will be a case of;

LAWYER: Well your honour we made a good faith effort to find the copyright holder, but as we couldn't contact the holder we released an exact copy of all their work in a box set for $59.99 as it was no longer covered by copyright.

JUDGE: What efforts did you undertake?

LAWYER: Well, *cough* we looked for the most obscure and most likely to be out of date address and mailed in alleged copyright owner in the plainest and blandest envelope we could possibly find with a covering letter sounding as much like a 419 scam as possible.... and they just didn't get back to us!