…and guess who is joining Sen. Patrick Leahy in pushing it it? None other than Howard Berman (right in photo at the 2008 Tech Policy Summit)—among the most extreme of copyright hawks, who even hails from L.A. So maybe in the end this legislation has a chance.
The bottom line if the bill passes: It’ll be less risky for U.S. sites like the main Project Gutenberg operation and Manybooks.net to discover and post works without locatable copyright holders. Distributed Proofreaders and the Internet Archive should also benefit, as could libraries and corporate digitization efforts by companies such as Microsoft and Google. We could see many more novels and other items digitized from 1923 and later.
The cynic’s perspective: In return for this legislation in the States and similar measures elsewhere, could various countries end up with still-longer copyright terms? As a gut reaction, however, I’m delighted to hear of the bill, as a start despite major concerns, such as, yes, a weaker House than Senate version. Ok, gang, get to work. What do you like and dislike? One risk is that the bill might be tucked into legislation that didn’t seem so helpful.
Arts Technica‘s Nate Andersen has the lowdown.
Could this be Hollywood protection at its finest? If you think about what works are most likely to be ‘orphaned,’ you’ll find novels rather than movies. So, Hollywood gets a new batch of material to consider making movies about and doesn’t have to worry about some author knocking on the door and saying, ‘hey, I wrote that.’
I’m not saying I disagree, but I certainly feel that it isn’t authors or book publishers who have driven the changes in copyright, it’s Hollywood.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
I suspect there may be some truth to that. I recently visited an artists forum in which the overwhelming sentiment was that this law would be very bad for artists. They argued that copyright currently does not *require* a person to register their work, however the danger of your work being labled an orphan goes up significantly if you don’t register each and every piece of work AND keep your contact information up to date. It completely flips the burden from the one who wants to reuse the material to the creator.