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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Really? That system worked fine in the United States for something like 150 years.
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It hasn't actually worked that well. There's an interesting article
here from Techdirt that describes the problem in more detail. You're minimizing how difficult it actually is to check the status of copyright on works; the problem is that the records themselves haven't been scanned and aren't searchable. So the result is that no one is bothering, and the works are effectively being lost.
Here's an on-point quote from the article:
Quote:
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The fact is, the majority of 1923-63 books are indeed in the public domain because they weren't renewed, but there's only one way to know this for sure: checking the records held by the Copyright Office. None of the records from that period have been digitized yet, so the only way to check them is by actually going to Washington and visiting the physical card catalogue, or paying a researcher to do it for you. Obviously this added effort and expense drastically limits the appeal of these suddenly-not-so-public domain works—and as the numbers from Amazon demonstrate, it's having a very real effect. Publishers are clearly eager to offer public domain titles, but are only comfortable doing so when the lack of copyright is guaranteed. All those later works are effectively removed from the public domain, preventing economic activity and making them hard for people to obtain.
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(emphasis added)
I take your point though, that if the U.S. implemented a renewal system now it wouldn't face the same issue (i.e. because the records would be electronic in the first place).