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]

We can't require registration even if we want to.

Sure we can. We simply withdraw from the onerous copyright treaties. And let's remember, these treaties were used to do an end-run around the proper legislative process in the US; instead of open debate amongst representatives who have to answer to their constituents, we got a fait accompli.

Remember, Berne et al requires the intolerable life+50 copyright term as a minimum (the US is currently at life+70). All those people who want shorter terms than that must necessarily support their country withdrawing from these treaties. So the anti-treaty sentiment is stronger than you might think.

Personally, I have no use for copyright treaties of any sort. I would like the nations of the world to individually adopt unilateral national treatment, and to informally cooperate so that there are no conflicts which are so great that an author could not have copyrights in two different jurisdictions due to the clash of laws. Other than that, which requires no treaty, we're best off with each country doing its own thing.

Re:Comparing copyright and patents is unwarranted

[cpt kangarooski]

Well, I guess it's a good thing then, that I fully support granting national treatment to foreign authors, regardless of whether or not their countries return the favor! Not once did I suggest that we not grant copyrights to foreign authors; I just said that the foreign authors need to register their works exactly the same as our domestic authors.

Whether or not a particular author seeks a US copyright, regardless of his own nationality, is up to him.

Further, let's bear in mind that unregistered works, would merely be public domain works, the same as works on which the term has lapsed. Right now any publisher can put out copies of public domain works, rather than pay for copyrighted works to publish. Yet, they tend to prefer to publish the latter! This is because copyrights are really of little direct value for authors, but are tremendously valued by publishers, since they don't like to have to compete with one another over the exact same material. So you would not see a flood of unregistered public domain works being published instead of copyrighted works (regardless of nationality, see above) because it's really not in the publishers' interests to do so. A few might pursue that as a niche, but that's it.

Since the US didn't have automatic copyrights for anyone until quite recently, our own history from 1891 -- when we began to grant copyrights to foreign authors who complied with the required formalities -- proves the point.