Re: what are orphan works?

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 9:17 AM, joseph harris <[email protected]> wrote:

> I am genuinely puzzled at what exactly people do expect to find that is of value. I'm not asking for either justification of the general idea, nor of the view opposing that. I don't think I've seen a fistful of actual examples, or even genuine areas that are going to produce this 'great benefit'.

Well, I'll use an example concrete to me, then.

I have a comb-bound manuscript that my great-grandfather wrote, called
"The Hegira of the Hupp", recounting his trip with his entire family
(including my 3-year-old grandfather) from Oklahoma to New York and
back in a Huppmobile over the course of several months back in the
1920s. There were no interstates back then, and in fact relatively few
paved roads of any kind. Can you imagine driving across the country on
dirt roads?

Very interesting book, and surely of great sociological and cultural
value to publish. I'd like to scan it and offer it as an e-book to
anyone who was interested.

The thing is, my great-grandfather wrote this book originally as a
series of columns for a newspaper that went out of business decades
ago.

Who owns the copyright? Did my great-grandfather keep rights to the
columns or were they work-for-hire? If they were work-for-hire, were
the copyrights renewed after 28 years? If they were renewed, with the
paper out of business decades ago, who owns them now? How could I even
find out? If my great-grandfather did keep the rights, what member of
his family did they devolve to?

In this situation, I expect I could probably just go ahead and publish
the work, as the copyrights are so lost that there would PROBABLY be
no claimant of ownership. But there's an infinitesimal chance that
someone MIGHT pop up and object, and if they wanted to object in the
courts I would have no way to defend against them. And so this
fascinating work that I would love to share with historians stays
locked up in its comb binding.

But even with that, it doesn't matter so much; the paper isn't going
to disintegrate and if I had to wait until the Bono-extended copyright
term expires, I technically could. But what really gets me is that
there are films from the early era of cinema that are decomposing in
their cans that restoration groups would love to get their hands on
and preserve but with their legal ownership up in the air they can't
take the risk. Valuable pieces of our heritage are literally rotting
away because nobody knows who owns them.

I'm sure there are lots of other stories about people wanting to
republish or remix orphaned works but not being able to due to fear of
legal action.
-- 
Chris Meadows aka         | WWW: http://www.terrania.us      | Somebody
Robotech_Master           | ICQ: 5477383  AIM: RoboMastr     | help, I'm
[email protected] | Skype, LJ-Gizmo: Robotech_Master | trapped in
[email protected]        | Facebook: Robotech.Master        | a sig file!


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