Is anybody aware of a legal precedent where a photo restoring firm was successfully sued by a copyright owner? Restoring a photo is akin to restoring an antique with a licensed design. It's restoring it to its original condition. While there are a lot of crazy lawsuits out there, it would be hard to imagine a photographer getting upset enough to sue somebody fifty years later simply because they wanted to restore an old photo they'd paid for back then. This may be an interesting "thought" exercise about the degree that copyrights can hinder something that affects the average consumer, but it's a meaningless one if a link cannot be provided to shows a successful lawsuit for that type of activity. If this is amongst the best arguments to relax copyright laws, it's pretty flimsy. If it's that big an issue, provide a fair use exclusion for such an action as being allowable.
In fact, adding clarification to Fair Use laws about what is okay and what is not okay is a better solution than creating a new category of orphaned exclusions from standard copyright protection. Opening up fair use for historical documentaries and educational use wouldn't upset too many people. Opening up orphaned work for clip art collections, paysites, book collections, and many other commercial products mining free "orphaned" images is not something any artist or photographer wants to see.
All the examples I've seen, for supporting these changes, seem to fall under things that can be accommodated by clarifications in the Fair Use portion of copyright law without making any larger changes.
It's the risk of damages that stops large scale commercial copyright infringements from taking place. There is less risk in hiring a photographer or artist to create a new work than risk damages stealing older works (which is a good thing for artists and photographers). Eliminate the financial recourse that an artist has and a big company can calculate that the risk of getting caught, and only having to pay normal compensation when caught, makes it highly profitable to release a collection of images that cost nothing to amass. They'd only have to pay for the copyright owners that catch them and, if there are only a few images in a thousand pack, give those artists the few reasonable compensated dollars they would pay them up front if they had to. Most of the artists, whose work they collected, will never find the infringement, so they're still way ahead of the game.
Let's fix the specific examples in copyright law that are unreasonable and not weaken the rights of copyright owners. The risk of abuse in these possible changes are far greater than the small number of valid things that will be fixed.
Re: How many valid needs are there for orphaned works?
In fact, adding clarification to Fair Use laws about what is okay and what is not okay is a better solution than creating a new category of orphaned exclusions from standard copyright protection. Opening up fair use for historical documentaries and educational use wouldn't upset too many people. Opening up orphaned work for clip art collections, paysites, book collections, and many other commercial products mining free "orphaned" images is not something any artist or photographer wants to see.
All the examples I've seen, for supporting these changes, seem to fall under things that can be accommodated by clarifications in the Fair Use portion of copyright law without making any larger changes.
It's the risk of damages that stops large scale commercial copyright infringements from taking place. There is less risk in hiring a photographer or artist to create a new work than risk damages stealing older works (which is a good thing for artists and photographers). Eliminate the financial recourse that an artist has and a big company can calculate that the risk of getting caught, and only having to pay normal compensation when caught, makes it highly profitable to release a collection of images that cost nothing to amass. They'd only have to pay for the copyright owners that catch them and, if there are only a few images in a thousand pack, give those artists the few reasonable compensated dollars they would pay them up front if they had to. Most of the artists, whose work they collected, will never find the infringement, so they're still way ahead of the game.
Let's fix the specific examples in copyright law that are unreasonable and not weaken the rights of copyright owners. The risk of abuse in these possible changes are far greater than the small number of valid things that will be fixed.