[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

That helps, but really it's central registration that would make it easier, since there would be one place to check the copyright.

For people who choose to register their copyrights, in the United States it is called the Library of Congress. Though since the actual term of copyright is so flexible it doesn't help people check current copyright status.

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.

Provided you can prove the work is your own. Lets say you write a story, and some how or other I get a copy of your story. Lets say I decide to publish it under my own name. Since you didn't register the work, you now have to prove that you wrote the work. Its for reasons like this that you can still register copyrights. And I believe the actual cost is relatively modest.

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.

In the age of the internet, when presumably everything can be done via the computer, and the fact that you can register a collection (under United States copyright anyway) meaning that all 30,000 of those images can be registered at the same time, why would this be a nightmare. I am rather sure that the amount of work to register the copyright is going to be far less than the amount of darkroom or computer work that the photographer is going to need to do to get them into publishable form.

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.

I am not talking about works that are in the public domain. Lets say a group of science fiction fans would like to see some old science fiction novels republished (This group exists, they are the New England Science Fiction Association), the biggest hurdle they might face is tracking down all the rights holders to get them to agree to allow them to republish the works.

Works that have marginal commercial value are frankly rarely served well by the current copyright scheme.

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Bill