Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
As far as I can tell the thing that everyone is actually complaining about is that certain books are not available. This is not, in and of itself about copyright law ...
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It is, actually. It's usually not that the work is lost as such, there are copies available in a library or somewhere. You just can't buy new ones, because nobody can be bothered to make any, or, as is frequently the case, nobody knows who the heirs are or who really owns the rights. So nobody dares touch this work for fear of suddenly being sued after all. This does't help anybody.
The EU has a new project underway, named "
Arrow" that tries to deal with such rights' ownership issues and orphaned works. It's early days yet, though.