Congress Considers Reform On Orphaned Works 153
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."
Reasonable Compensation (Score:5, Insightful)
Just making it easier for big corps... (Score:5, Insightful)
More to read here. [awn.com]
Why limit penalties? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just making it easier for big corps... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just making it easier for big corps... (Score:4, Insightful)
To expand on one of the why's for those that may question this, Corporations will have a department or at least a set of dedicated employees who do nothing but verify and respond to contested copyrights that they own. Individuals or small businesses may not be able to afford the manpower needed to manage such overhead. This means that corporations can keep a tight leash on their IP, while making use of material where the creator is identified as "not likely to keep up". Effectively, this increases the base "cost" of maintaining a stable of copyrights so that the riffraff will be right out (5mil$ at the door please).
This is but one of the things such legislation is likely to be used for, and i'm sure others out there can point out more.
Re:Unacceptable (Score:3, Insightful)
A copyright term of infinity+ years isn't "limited".
The flaw is internet anonymization. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you think about it this has mostly just been produced as a bandaid to allow things like archiving to occur in the absence of a strong public domain and working fair use.
Re:Why limit penalties? (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest problem with this sort of legislation is that the attorney fees are a part of what makes this kind of suit so expensive for the losing side. If the legislation limits the cost to just an easy to calculate amount without having to involve attorneys it's far more useful. It's not going to help much if a person can't calculate an estimate of the eventual cost without first being sued.
Putting things into the public domain willy nilly like this, isn't necessarily a good solution either. It favors the corporations which can afford to have somebody answering requests. While much of what ends up in the public domain will be from smaller businesses and individuals.
We really don't need additional rewards for producing mass market media, what we need is more rewards for producing the more artistically challenging works. The ones that require real risk and sacrifice to create. The ones which drive the majority of the innovations in the art world. The same largely goes for software as well.
Abandoned really ought to be based more upon availability of the works for purchase than the ability of somebody to answer the phone or an email in a timely fashion.
Re:Why limit penalties? (Score:3, Insightful)
The work is still under copyright and the children of the now deceased copyright holder can still make claims on the work.
Making it public domain opens up a whole new can of worms.
Re:Orphaned work you say ? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. This means that when the members of the RIAA/MPAA/BSA want to use someone else's work, they only have to show that they "couldn't identify" the copyright holder, and so can use work while paying only a token penalty. Basically, now a small copyright holder has to undertake the same sort of monitoring as a large record studio. Otherwise they risk having their work appropriated by larger corporation.
Re:Why limit penalties? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reasonable Compensation (Score:4, Insightful)
That having been said, I'm not a fan of this particular bill. Shorter terms, non-automatic renewals, and timely registration as a prerequisite for copyright are much better, even though they'll take more work to achieve. I'd rather pursue that directly, rather than waste time on these mediocre reforms.
Re:Reasonable Compensation (Score:5, Insightful)
The good faith effort (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that forty years sounds like eternity to the eternally adolescent Geek - but your treasure trove will almost certainly turn out to be an instantly recognizable icon of commercial art and illustration.
The page clipped from Life magazine, the poster that was taped to a dorm room wall.
What looks like a "good faith effort" to you may may look pathetically inadequate and self-serving to a judge. It is altogether too easy not to find what you don't want to find.
Re:Reasonable Compensation (Score:3, Insightful)
I would agree with such a seven year scheme, with one minor condition: the initial seven year copyright period should begin on the date of first authorized publication in a fixed form. Until published with the authorization of the creator, any material should be the property of the creator, period, with no right of anyone to publish it during the life of the creator. This protects against a certain class of abuses of works that otherwise would not be protected at all for lack of registration (someone publishing an unfinished manuscript that the author loaned them to proofread 7 years earlier, unauthorized publication of personal letters, etc.). For non-corporate creations, it is not at all uncommon for a creation to take much more than 7 years to complete.
BTW, intellectual property is already taxed based on the income from that property. Outside of that income, copyrights have no inherent value, so I can't see how taxing them would make sense. That could also put an unfortunate burden on individuals who actually own the copyrights for their own creations, depending on how the value is calculated, thus forcing the licensing of copyright to works that the author may not yet be ready to license. Thus, IMHO taxing copyrights is probably not a good idea.
Patents, however, do have some value in the form of binding your competitors' hands. I'm not sure how measurable that is, though, so assessing its value for taxation purposes could be difficult....