I made the statement from the standpoint of a copyright owner whose work can be infringed safely by these bills.
To that extent, are you for this law so that somebody, who cannot find you, through a diligent search, can safely legally use your works without securing your express permission (or that of your heirs far in the future?
Let's ignore whether or not you believe that you can always be found through a diligent search since the exact standards for those searches have only loosely been described and will differ on a case by case basis on the type of work. The question isn't whether you can be found, but whether or not, as a copyright owner, you're comfortable with a law, that allows your copyrighted works to be used by others. The resources that would be used to find the copyright owner of a recording will differ from those that ought to be used to find the owner of an old book or that of an unattributed photograph. Artists and photographers tend to be more concerned about the bills than writers because net search engines use words for searching.
The only aspect of the bill, that might be worthwhile, is that of freeing up copyright orphans for public view. To that extent, your being for the bill will probably be less as a copyright owner and more as an audience for what was lost. In everything I've read, I've yet to hear of specific examples of what lost works will be resurrected. Everybody keeps speaking in generalities.
The vast majority of "lost" works are not copyright orphans. They're not so much lost as they are not financially viable for the owner to release. The bulk of "lost" works are owned by the publisher/company that either released them nationally or by whatever company bought the rights to them. If you can think of a movie or book or song that you'd like to have available today, the odds are that some large corporation owns it and has no compelling financial reason to release it because it won't sell enough copies to make the effort worthwhile. For those works to be known, they had wide distribution to be historically noteworthy. That distribution was usually at the hands of a company with signficant resources. The orphan bills will not free up those works.
I would love to hear of what movies, books, radio shows, pulp magazines, music, or other orphaned works will become available to the public with the release of these bills. It would be nice to see examples of diligent search requirements that the Register of Copyrights will hold as standards for these bills prior to the bills being enacted. These things are only spoken of in generalities. I'd hate to see the bills become law without having more specifics in place. It would be nice to know what the public gains over the potential risks of copyrights being violated. For every specific valid use of a copyright orphan, the bills can be more specifically tailored to allow that need without being as broad as they currently are.
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Re: Lawsuit of Countless Illegal Copies
Date: 2008-07-01 09:04 pm (UTC)I made the statement from the standpoint of a copyright owner whose work can be infringed safely by these bills.
To that extent, are you for this law so that somebody, who cannot find you, through a diligent search, can safely legally use your works without securing your express permission (or that of your heirs far in the future?
Let's ignore whether or not you believe that you can always be found through a diligent search since the exact standards for those searches have only loosely been described and will differ on a case by case basis on the type of work. The question isn't whether you can be found, but whether or not, as a copyright owner, you're comfortable with a law, that allows your copyrighted works to be used by others. The resources that would be used to find the copyright owner of a recording will differ from those that ought to be used to find the owner of an old book or that of an unattributed photograph. Artists and photographers tend to be more concerned about the bills than writers because net search engines use words for searching.
The only aspect of the bill, that might be worthwhile, is that of freeing up copyright orphans for public view. To that extent, your being for the bill will probably be less as a copyright owner and more as an audience for what was lost. In everything I've read, I've yet to hear of specific examples of what lost works will be resurrected. Everybody keeps speaking in generalities.
The vast majority of "lost" works are not copyright orphans. They're not so much lost as they are not financially viable for the owner to release. The bulk of "lost" works are owned by the publisher/company that either released them nationally or by whatever company bought the rights to them. If you can think of a movie or book or song that you'd like to have available today, the odds are that some large corporation owns it and has no compelling financial reason to release it because it won't sell enough copies to make the effort worthwhile. For those works to be known, they had wide distribution to be historically noteworthy. That distribution was usually at the hands of a company with signficant resources. The orphan bills will not free up those works.
I would love to hear of what movies, books, radio shows, pulp magazines, music, or other orphaned works will become available to the public with the release of these bills. It would be nice to see examples of diligent search requirements that the Register of Copyrights will hold as standards for these bills prior to the bills being enacted. These things are only spoken of in generalities. I'd hate to see the bills become law without having more specifics in place. It would be nice to know what the public gains over the potential risks of copyrights being violated. For every specific valid use of a copyright orphan, the bills can be more specifically tailored to allow that need without being as broad as they currently are.
Richard Gagnon