The orphan works legislation would not provide you any protection you do not already have. All the legislation does is remove penalties for using copyrighted material that can be classified as orphans if a diligent search cannot uncover the copyright owner. This legislation is an exemption to the remedies currently available to any copyright owner. The legislation only removes the ability to collect penalties and legal fees from copyright infringers if the infringer did a good faith search to find the copyright owner. The only people getting protection, by this legislation, are copyright infringers. There is zero benefit to copyright owners. In the example you used, the orphan legislation would not have helped you and, had the copyright violator tried to find the various copyright owners, the bills would have protected the infringer from being sued. In your example this was a clear case of copyright infringement.
At best, you won't be harmed by this legislation if you want to believe that very exhaustive searches will be made to find copyright owners. You won't be helped by it, but it might not hurt you. At worst, this legislation could open wide the gates to new legal forms of copyright infringement if the standards for conducting searches aren't very stringent. Unfortunately, there are no examples being maintained by the copyright office to provide an indication of what such searches will require.
No copyright owner should want these bills. At most, they should be restricted to nonprofit use and that will drastically limit the amount of new infringements allowed by the bills while maintaining the intent of the bills to foster the use of historical material (the bills have no age limit to stop something produced today from being orphaned tomorrow).
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Re: Lawsuit of Countless Illegal Copies
Date: 2008-06-19 09:46 pm (UTC)At best, you won't be harmed by this legislation if you want to believe that very exhaustive searches will be made to find copyright owners. You won't be helped by it, but it might not hurt you. At worst, this legislation could open wide the gates to new legal forms of copyright infringement if the standards for conducting searches aren't very stringent. Unfortunately, there are no examples being maintained by the copyright office to provide an indication of what such searches will require.
No copyright owner should want these bills. At most, they should be restricted to nonprofit use and that will drastically limit the amount of new infringements allowed by the bills while maintaining the intent of the bills to foster the use of historical material (the bills have no age limit to stop something produced today from being orphaned tomorrow).
Richard Gagnon