Quote:
Originally Posted by asjogren
I do believe that if a work has been published, but is no longer for sale with general availability (given some grace period) I believe it should revert to public domain.
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I disagree. Cheap, mandatory licensing for copyrighted orphan and unavailable works. The author gets paid, but you cannot subtract knowledge from the Human corpus of knowledge, and you'll get better rates for keeping your own version available.
arvsinha - The problems with a "registration" system are...numerous. Quite simply, you're going to need an ever-expanding bureaucracy to deal with it (an Orphan system only needs to deal with the subset which is commercially interesting), and adding ideas to the Human corpus of knowledge in a way which protects authors always costs them money - a considerable disincentive to the poor and people creating for the joy of creation.
The issues of the American copyright regime when it required registering are worth reading up on.