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Originally Posted by Hitch
Many of the posts about books disappearing into the ether seem to indicate/imply that books owned by corporations, outright, can disappear into the ether for all of eternity (a hopeful reader's lifetime, anyway), for the copyright period of X (life + 50, whatever it ends up as, if it even changes).
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Perhaps. And I found your post educational. But my thought was that rights disappearance typically comes after the book reverts to the author.
This could be exaggerated, although it comes from an usually reliable source:
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. . . specialists say orphan works could make up the bulk of the collections of some major libraries.
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This is less extreme and
thus seems more plausible:
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A conservative estimate of the number of orphan books as a percentage of incopyright books across Europe puts the number at 3 million orphan books (13 % of the total number of in-copyright books). The older the books the higher the percentage of orphan works.
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Also significant in my last link:
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The cost of clearing rights may amount to several times the cost of digitising the material.
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High costs mean no eBook.
I don't think that justifies the more extreme proposals. But confusion over rights certainly is a good argument again ever again lengthening copyright, and suggests need for countries with the longest copyright lengths to reduce them.