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Originally Posted by GA Russell
Thus my concern about the publishers' lack of ability.
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In case you missed it, several items on that list explicitly mention the author's rights, intents and wishes. An author should not, under any circumstances, be forced to sign a contract or release materials in a specific medium.
Also, who else should handle this task? Perhaps the government? IMO this would be a terrible idea, as it gives government too much power over digital content. It would be a tremendously expensive task, which is unlikely to happen in the onrushing age of austerity. Who would set the prices -- legislators? The Library of Congress, perhaps? And in the US in particular, would run the risk of censorship and/or massive partisan battles over what content is "acceptable." And of course, by the time you actually figure out how to legislate the required destruction of copyright (an unlikely event), the publishers will have put out most of the back catalogs anyway.
Google, perhaps? They are trampling over the author's rights to manage their content; the quality is low; they've often bowed to authoritarian governments. Nor has Google demonstrated that it is a fine steward of content or respectful of privacy.
How about the authors? If the contracts don't explicitly reference digital rights, or if the publisher returns the digital rights, then there's no problem. However, that's hardly going to produce a solution overnight.
Any entity other than a publisher, or author who successfully captures or asserts the rights, that is capable of doing the job brings a whole host of issues to the table -- compulsion, violation of contracts, censorship, privacy to name a few. I'd say in this particular instance, it's much better to let the markets take their course.
Or to put it another way: Your desire for Product X in Format Y
Right Now, Dammit does not legitimize the total disregard of an author's wishes, a publisher's rights, or international copyright law.
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Originally Posted by GA Russell
In regard to copyright, I am in favor of "use it or lose it". I object to a publisher having the legal right to keep a book off the market because it does not think the book will sell.
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Meaning what? That a rights holder should be required by law to publish a book in a format that
you demand, or lose those rights?
Allowing open or free use of an orphan work can create a massive loophole. For example, the copyrights of photographers are routinely abused already; it would be easy for an art director to claim they couldn't locate the rights holder of an image, and use it freely. And we're not talking about images 70 years old -- abuses of images less than 10 years old, by people who fully understand that it's an infringement, is downright routine.
This is not to say that the status quo in regard to orphaned works is ideal, far from it. Rather, any plan regarding orphan works needs to be carefully managed in order to avoid abuses.