Colleen Vermillion
pro member
Don't know where this belongs exactly. I think it's interesting, but not likely to provoke a throw down, so I dropped it in here.
An article by Mark Simon recently stirred up some debate about orphaned works legislation supposedly coming up for a vote in the US. There was a rebuttal by Meredith Patterson among others. There is no legislation currently before Congress, and both the articles I linked aren't exactly scholarly, but there could be some legislation coming in the near future, so I think it might be worthwhile to think about the pros and cons.
So where do you fall on the orphaned works spectrum? I'm more toward the returning orphaned works to the public domain end rather than perpetual copyright end, but I'm not as impacted by copyright infringement as some of y'all are... One person brought up the point that allowing someone to use an orphaned work without penalty until the copyright holder comes forward gives some incentive to steal. If you only have to pay normal royalties for the period of time you were using the orphaned work if the copyright holder does come forward, the less ethical might be quick to label something as orphaned when a little more work might turn up the owner. You get to use it for free if the owner doesn't turn up, and if they do turn up, you're no worse off then if you paid their royalties up front. On the other hand, imposing high penalties on people who use copyrighted material that turns out not to have been orphaned might prevent the use of a truly orphaned work and it would be lost to us forever.
-Colleen
An article by Mark Simon recently stirred up some debate about orphaned works legislation supposedly coming up for a vote in the US. There was a rebuttal by Meredith Patterson among others. There is no legislation currently before Congress, and both the articles I linked aren't exactly scholarly, but there could be some legislation coming in the near future, so I think it might be worthwhile to think about the pros and cons.
So where do you fall on the orphaned works spectrum? I'm more toward the returning orphaned works to the public domain end rather than perpetual copyright end, but I'm not as impacted by copyright infringement as some of y'all are... One person brought up the point that allowing someone to use an orphaned work without penalty until the copyright holder comes forward gives some incentive to steal. If you only have to pay normal royalties for the period of time you were using the orphaned work if the copyright holder does come forward, the less ethical might be quick to label something as orphaned when a little more work might turn up the owner. You get to use it for free if the owner doesn't turn up, and if they do turn up, you're no worse off then if you paid their royalties up front. On the other hand, imposing high penalties on people who use copyrighted material that turns out not to have been orphaned might prevent the use of a truly orphaned work and it would be lost to us forever.
-Colleen
