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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."
While it may be true that this is pushed by big media, I hardly see how this is failing to accord appropriate protections to so-called "amateur" creators. Amateurs, like anyone else, can fairly easily register any work which they create with the copyright office. Further, you can do something like stick an email address or other contact information on the video/image/webpage/etc... so that there is some way for anyone wanting to use your copyrighted work to contact you (this has the dual function of also identifying that the work has an active "owner" who needs to be contacted). Neither of those approaches is overly burdensome, even for amateurs.
It seems that everyone favors liberalization of copyright laws only if it helps out the "little guy." Copyright needs to be a balance, allowing both large media holders and individual content creators to play fairly under the same set of rules. This bill would help achieve that.
since 'copyleft' depends on copyright for any actual *legal weight* i'd guess there are potentially serious implications for FOSS, pretty much as a whole