>The difficulties of overlong terms is not with the tiny percentage of
>works that are still generating income, but with the vast majority of
>works which stopped generating income so many years ago that nobody
>knows who the the rightholders are.
If it ever generated income at all.
This email is a work, protected by copyright, which will endure to the end of my life, the end of the year in which I log off, and (under Canadian law) for another 50 years after that.
>What if there was a default
>licensing scheme run by the copyright office? Works older than say, 50
>years would be licensed by the copyright office for some kind of fairly
>low fee, and the money held in trust for possible owners.
Who does the office pay this money out to?
How does a claimant prove they are entitled to payment in respect of the copyright in a letter written by someone in 1894?
>rightsholders for a percentage of the take. Net result, more works
>used, more money paid to rights holders.
More works used? Perhaps. More money paid? Probably not. If someone who has had the time and inclination to research and locate an old work, isunable to determine and located the copyright owner (if there is one), then a copyright office or collective management regime is not going to have any better luck. Received on Fri Nov 21 2003 - 00:30:30 GMT
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