Re: Re: limits on copyright--Orphan works

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 08:30, Agenbroad, James (Civ,ARL/CISD) wrote:
> 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. 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.

There actually is a registration method for orphaned works in Canada, although little used it seems. I believe the correct link is:   http://www.accesscopyright.ca/rightsholders.asp?a=92 although perhaps one of our Canadian colleagues has better information. You can be granted a license to use the work after a diligent search for the copyright holder. This at least gets you out of the catch-22 of not being able to find the rights holder and therefore not being able to use the work.

-- 
-------------------------------------
Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
--------------------------------------