[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by charleski

I still haven't seen any convincing argument against a requirement for registration in order to maintain rights in a published work.

• Rapid protection for works that need to be distributed quickly (e.g. an illustrator, writer, photographer, newspaper, magazine that produces copyrighted work very fast and/or in large volumes).
• The system to handle registrations is extremely slow, and the government shows no interest in speeding up the process.
• Registration can place an undue burden on many artists and rights holders.
• Disputes or confusion over the rights can happen at any time, and is responsible for an unknown number of orphan works. I.e. registration won't resolve all orphaned works, unless it becomes onerous and/or frequent enough to utterly swamp the Copyright Office.

Required repeat registrations place an undue burden on both the content creators and society at large. And since it won't resolve some of the problems that result in orphaned works anyway, is it really worth the costs?

Originally Posted by charleski

Other forms of IP require it, and for two hundred years copyright did as well, so there is no 'natural' endowment to be considered

I may have missed it, but no one is making any such claim. "Physical property rights" are just as much a social, political, cultural and economic construction as are intellectual rights.

Originally Posted by charleski

Questions of cost are a red herring, since, in the US at least, the majority of commercially-viable copyrightable material is initially registered anyway in order to qualify for statutory damages....

Really? So I just imagined that people used the "Poor Man's Copyright" then?

Originally Posted by charleski

adding a requirement for renewal would be trivial for most professionals, and would only burden those who fail to keep track of their work.

And, again, for the copyright office. Required repeat registrations would increase their already overburdened workload and backlog.

You may also want to try managing a large inventory of artworks before proclaiming it to be cheap and/or easy.

Originally Posted by charleski

The purpose is simple: the preservation of our heritage.

Managing orphaned works has almost nothing to do with "preserving our heritage."

The number of orphaned works is relatively small, and most of those works were abandoned because no one paid any attention to them. The reason why a text is languishing in a university library somewhere is because they are not vital to the culture at large.

This is not to say that the issue shouldn't be resolved, only that we don't need to treat every single crumb that fell from the dinner table like it's a truffle. Nor do we need to hamstring artists in the process of sweeping up a fraction of those crumbs.