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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Unfortunately I'm not sure how "granting unlimited rights to the first person who digitizes an orphaned movie" is a viable solution, especially if the problem is that those rights are contested or in dispute (as opposed to an inability to locate the rights holder). Nor am I sure that the most equitable way to resolve the problem is via class action lawsuits.
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Oh, me too. Just pointing out that "wait for copyright to expire" has its costs and problems as well.
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By the way, is Google scanning Fanzines and theses? Are the theses typically copyrighted -- and really all that hard to find the ex-student?
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AFAIK, Google is not scanning fanzines; I don't know if they're scanning theses. However, many of their docs are coming from university libraries--which include large collections of theses, and some of them contain fanzine archives.
Everything on paper after ~1978 is copyrighted. Before that, it's copyrighted if there's a proper notation on it, which many of them have.
Finding ex-student: Hypothetical--Mary Smith, age 27 writes her thesis in 1979, and graduates soon after. In 1981, she marries Bob Jones, and they move 1000 miles from where she attended school. They have 3 children over the next 7 years, Steven, Bob Jr, and Teresa. In 2001, Mary, age 49, and Bob are killed in a car crash. Mary never owned a computer. Finding Steve, Bob, or Teresa Jones to get permission to use Mary's thesis is going to be difficult.
Other hypothetical: In 1965, Tom, a physicist at Major University, writes a brilliant document on planetary dynamics. The university publishes it, and it's used in physics classes for the next four years, until the lunar landing brings up such new insights that anything pre-Apollo is considered irrelevant. Tom was almost 60 years old when he wrote it, and he dies peacefully in 1987, leaving all his estate to his 70-year-old wife; they had no children. In 1992, she dies. Her heirs are her sister's children. Or maybe her sister's grandchildren.
You can imagine plenty of similar nightmares. These aren't the majority of cases--but they're not small, obscure possibilities, either.
Pamela Samuelson
outlines some of the problems with the Googlebooks settlement in regards to academic authors specifically.