Re: droit de suite

On 04/05/2000, Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> I see two very big problems with the current state of copyright law:
>
> 1. Copyright is being misused to try and silence whistle-blowers.
> The "Cyber Patrol" case and the Lighthouse Ministry cases spring
> immediately to mind, plus the perennial lawsuits by [That Church
> Tom Cruise Belongs To]. This isn't about protecting authors from
> pirate sales; it's about stopping the public from seeing various
> embarrassing-but-true things about certain wealthy corporations
> and congregations.
>
> Proposed solution: if a work is (a) copyrighted by an organization
> rather than a human, (b) published within the organization but not
> sold to the general public, and (c) contains reasonably newsworthy
> information, it should be made legal for third parties to copy and
> publish the relevant parts for news reporting purposes.

You have some very good ideas, but they might need to be refined more. The paragraph above, for example, might come into conflict with so-called "Freedom of Information" statutes. I requested material from a public agency, and I knew exactly what I wanted. Turned out I could have copies of public records, but not copies of internal agency memoranda. If you followed the Microsoft trial, all those incriminating emails probably qualify as memoranda rather than records.

> 2. Copyright term extension vastly increases the number of "lost"
> works (i.e. the work has been out-of-print for half a century;
> current copyright holder can't be identified; no copies exist
> outside of museum rare-book collections...

Books published in the last century that go out of print are almost always available in libraries and in a now-very-active second-hand book market. It's almost never the case that "no copies exist outside of museum rare-book collections." Sometimes a book is out of print for 50 years because it had no audience at the time but a demand developed much later. If a pressing and insatiable demand develops five years after the book goes out of print, and the right holder can't be found, what would probably work better is a fiduciary to hold the copyright fees in case the rights holder or a successor shows up.

What you're talking about is the instance of a missing owner, and I betcha there's lots of case law on that. A bank can't appropriate my savings account if it can't find me, and has to turn the funds over to the state, which will allow me to retrieve them. I can't move into an empty house and make it my own just because there's no record of who owns it.

> Proposed solution: if a work (a) has been previously published,
> (b) no new copies of the work have been offered for sale in the
> last 28 years, and (c) the Copyright Office has no contact info
> for the current copyright holder, then it should be made legal
> for third parties to copy and republish the work upon payment
> of a mechanical royalty.

(A) I don't believe it's currently the responsibility of the Copyright Office to keep track of the whereabouts of rights holders, or that they're even set up to do this. So you need another party willing to hold the money and with the authority to make a determination as to whether the owner can be found. It would be a conflict of interest if the determination were made by the party who hoped to profit through the absence of the owner.

But we also have to address the question of the scope of the problem. Are there actually a great number of wanted books that can't be put back in print because the rights holder can't be located? My impression is that this almost never occurs, and that it certainly can't be classsified as a common kind of copyright problem.

pat sloane
<patsloane[_at_]aol.com> Received on Wed Apr 05 2000 - 13:23:16 GMT