Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
The problem with L+70 copyrights ... that often, those heirs can't be identified or tracked down, especially when one or more "heirs" is a publishing company, which may have been bought by another company, which may have gone bankrupt & had its assets sold in an auction, and nobody knows what happened to the copyrights.
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I just read where this happened to a publisher. They wanted to release a deceased author's backlist but couldn't as they were unable to locate some of the 12 descendents (at least) who owned the copyrights. Even if they did find them the negotiations (trying to get them to agree to terms while spread throughout the earth) and title search would have been cost prohibitive. Evidently, there was no estate manager.