It's also a fundamental problem with our current copyright law where material remains in copyright for many decades after it has stopped being printed and sold through primary channels.
Copyright should automatically expire 10 or 15 years after the last printing IMHO. If nobody cares enough to put it up for sale or even make a tiny print run just to renew the copyright, why should the government continue to enforce it?
Of course this scheme falls apart a bit in the digital age, except that even ebooks get pulled from the shelves for no apparent reason. Maybe we should just go back to having to explicitly renew copyright after 15 years or so, with a fee just large enough to convince people to drop dormant works. Maybe a couple hundred bucks every 5 years.
The best part would be having some easily accessed online system where you could check the copyright status of any work, including current contact information for the rightsholders if you want to arrange payment.
Expiring copyright after 15 years no matter the printing might even be a better solution. That would allow other people to build and extend works, movies and software.
Yup. The way I see it, a lot of IP problems are caused by people who want to take the law intended for promoting new works, and turn it into a source of passive income.
But people wouldn't be encouraged to make original works if their great grandchildren would be robbed of the opportunity to squabble over the rights to it in the courts.
Copyright should automatically expire 10 or 15 years after the last printing IMHO. If nobody cares enough to put it up for sale or even make a tiny print run just to renew the copyright, why should the government continue to enforce it?
Of course this scheme falls apart a bit in the digital age, except that even ebooks get pulled from the shelves for no apparent reason. Maybe we should just go back to having to explicitly renew copyright after 15 years or so, with a fee just large enough to convince people to drop dormant works. Maybe a couple hundred bucks every 5 years.
The best part would be having some easily accessed online system where you could check the copyright status of any work, including current contact information for the rightsholders if you want to arrange payment.