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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Fixed terms with renewal actually make it far easier to determine if a book is still under copyright.
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That helps, but really it's
central registration that would make it easier, since there would be one place to check the copyright.
However, this also winds up disadvantageous to the "little guy" and/or freelancer. The instant you put something into a fixed form, you're protected. No need for a bunch of paperwork or fees, you're protected, period.
Or consider photographers. A pro shooter could easily create 200 images a day, 3 days a week. Good luck filing all the paperwork on 2400 images per month
and renewing them all 20 or 40 years later. Even if I can register a collection, that means registering close to 30,000 images
per year. Many of those works can in fact hold commercial value for quite some time, and if you're doing stock work you never know what's going to sell. To content creators like this, registration is a huge nightmare.
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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Under the current system, they first have to determine if the author is alive or dead. If he is dead, when he died, and then they have to track down whoever inherited the rights to the book. This is often a non-trivial task which is why many books are considered orphan works.
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At this point you've got several hundred volunteers who are good enough and interested enough to actually track that kind of thing down, and do the best they can to determine if something is in PD. Hence you have large numbers of works newly distributed as PD every year.