Copyrights That No One Knows About Don't Help Anyone

COPYRIGHTS THAT NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT DON'T HELP ANYONE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Hal Varian]
Under current law, a work is automatically copyrighted the moment it is “fixed in tangible form.” And these days, that copyright lasts virtually forever: 70 years after the death of the author, in most cases. Since there is no requirement to register a work and a copyright lasts so long, the legal owner of a work can be difficult to find, particularly when the work is more than a few decades old. The costs of locating rights holders are an example of what economists call transactions costs. Not surprisingly, high transactions costs tend to discourage transactions from occurring. The so-called orphan works problem was examined by the Copyright Office in a 2006 report in which it proposed legislation to address the transactions costs issues. Under its proposal, if you conducted a “diligent search” to locate a rights holder and still failed to find the owner, you would be off the hook. You could then incorporate the work in question into your own work, as long as you provided proper attribution. If the legitimate rights holder was subsequently found, he or she could not require that your work be withdrawn from circulation, but could collect “reasonable compensation” for use. But what is a “diligent search?” The report leaves the interpretation of this phrase up to the courts but suggests some relevant considerations: whether the work includes identification, the age of the work, whether the work can be found in public databases like Copyright Office records, and so on. The Copyright Office’s proposal is certainly a step in the right direction. Clarifying the rights and obligations of the buyers and sellers of copyrighted material would reduce transactions costs, and that should lead to a more efficient market for intellectual property. But does the proposed legislation go far enough?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/business/31scene.html
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