[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

If registration was required, the volume of data they would need to host and index would be tremendous. And who's going to fund it? Do you genuinely believe that Congress will appropriate $500 million to the Copyright Office and increase their annual spending to build a registration website, when they are cutting funds to everything in sight?

I'd suggest leaving registration as automatic, like it is now, for ~20-30 years, and then requiring registration to renew. Those things that are still commercial viable in a couple of decades can be renewed; everything else can fall into the public domain. That doesn't drastically increase the copyright office's workload.

Also: cost of renewal should be higher than initial (optional) registration, to cover (1) CO's operating costs and (2) a penalty for denying the public use of the material--a monopoly tax.

If your work isn't worth $2,000 for 20-40 years of exclusivity, it doesn't need to be renewed. Although it's possible that a token renewal fee of $20 would be enough to let most things lapse; the requirement of registering would make most people not bother.

What Google did was sweep up every book in a given library in its scanning project, and force the authors to opt out -- and if they did not opt out by a certain date, they were in whether they liked it or not. Google made zero effort to track down or find the copyright holders, did not allow any proofreading or review of the scanned book, and did not allow any sort of negotiation on rates. The Settlement also would have given Google an effective monopoly over the orphaned works -- hardly an ideal situation.

Yep, and this is one of the reasons I opposed the settlement... nice idea, too heavily skewed towards "Google gets to do anything it wants; ignore that pesky copyright law thing and all those book contracts."

I think the Googlebooks preview function is within the range of fair use (well, mostly; a case could be made that it makes too much available, but that's the kind of hairsplitting we have courts to figure out), but the ability to sell those books, regardless of author wishes, without even allowing for authors to provide accurate-text versions, is way beyond the power of a settlement to grant.

Nor, ultimately, does the Author's Guild have the authority to settle in the first place. They don't hold the copyrights, thus they can't give away someone else's rights in a legal settlement.

Several groups pointed this out as well. They may have some arguable right to represent the interests of all authors who are members of the guild; they have no right--and made no effort--to defend the interests of copyright owners of entirely different kinds of works.

Like it or not, this is a job for Congress; and the solution is not going to involve shortening copyright, or requiring registration, and will need to protect the artists who are alive and working.

If it doesn't involve shortening copyright, we're going to have a growing digital split between corporate copyright interests and individual non-commercial use. Copyright infringement penalties are absolutely ridiculous when applied to individuals, and most people who look at the cases agree--there's no way that uploading a couple-dozen songs is a couple-million dollars worth of damage to anyone.

(My local community: several clubs have now declared that "open mic night" can only allow original songs because of copyright hassles. This is... not helping anyone. Requiring tiny bars to pay royalties for amateur performances with an audience of 20-odd people is not what copyright law was designed for.)