[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Hitch

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I recall working on digitizing a book published in the Soviet Union. No listed Author, No Year, no traces of anything about this thing online.... so the guess is this was printed anywhere from 1922-1990. Could be Public Domain, could have someone's unexpired copyrights on it for the next hundred years.

This also halts any sort of Derivative Works from occurring, like translations. Let us say we would want to take that text and translate it into Russian... no can do!

Non-Fiction Economics Books

A lot of the books I work on: Author dead, obscure publisher (most likely foreign) gets bought out by who knows who, giant spaghetti nest of rights ensues.

There is a (small) market for these books to be digitized/reprinted, but spending on a search + tens/hundreds of hours of manpower (which is not guaranteed to EVEN FIND THE RIGHTS OWNER), would quickly drive the project to unprofitability.

And even the potential threat of litigation causes many companies to just drop it there, or never go that far in the first place.

Or let's say you DO run across a rights-owner:

Over the decades, one of the guys I do a lot of work for has tried to get HUNDREDS of these obscure out-of-print publications digitized/reprinted... he told me to NOT waste my time.

He spent years, even with a best-case-scenario of OF THE AUTHORS THEMSELVES helping, trying to get the stuff reprinted... the publishers are like mules. Many insist on fees and/or restrictions which would drive the entire project into unprofitability before it even got off the ground!

The authors signed their soul to the devil, and now their own books are locked away forever.

Originally Posted by Hitch

I tend to disagree that in this day and age, any book remotely current will expire and be lost forever, if only because a) someone will probably try to sell a bootleg copy on Amazon or b) Gutenberg and any inheritors/successors will probably try to keep it alive, as well, but...it could happen, yes.

Obscure Journals

There are also plenty of things like Journals/Articles/Pamphlets that don't get reprinted, and/or get lost down the memory hole.

In the case of one journal we digitized, it was only sold to probably a few hundreds of people back in the 70s/80s. Only a few packrats/donators had copies still stashed somewhere after 20+ years.

Now that we were able to redigitize them, we could breathe new life back into it (pull out individual articles, write about it, reference it, etc., etc.).

Imagine if the publisher of the journal went out of business though... these separate packrats/donators probably wouldn't spend the resources to try to digitize their own collections... because they might get attacked by some nebulous rights-holder!

And with journals, who knows what hornet's nest of copyright you might stir up (each individual AUTHOR might own their own little pieces).

By the time the copyright would have expired, the few remaining copies would probably be long gone. And any physical collections left would likely be missing many volumes.

Other Media

While not books, these deal with video:

The only known surviving copy of Super Bowl I:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ocked-up.shtml

The NFL even tried to attack CBS for INTERVIEWING the guy about it. And they are even prohibiting him FROM SELLING HIS OWN VHS TAPE (unless it's sold to the NFL... for their paltry sum).

Or this woman had recorded TV news from 1977-2012 onto VHS tapes. Many of those are the only copies that are known to exist any more:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3022022/...ars-of-tv-news

Or the missing Doctor Who episodes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor...ssing_episodes

There are also examples of original copies of (digital) movies getting lost:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/...e-obsolescence

Or the famous example of Toy Story 2's source files being deleted, and luckily being backed up on one of the worker's home computers:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...e-backup.shtml

Originally Posted by Hitch

This seems bizarre to me. What publishing house would willingly NOT print more copies fo a book that's in high demand, like a best-seller?

Foreign Works + Translations

The books may be very successful in country X, but the publisher has absolutely no intention of expanding its release to non-X regions.

Different Editions

Speaking of another case where an author/publisher might refuse to reprint:

I remember one book where the author's Second Edition was completely morphed to pretty much the complete OPPOSITE conclusions he had in the First Edition. I doubt the author/publisher would now want the First Edition to see the light of day!

We would be interested in reprinting the First Edition though, because that was the correct one.

Originally Posted by barryem

Another interesting fact I found in my googling was that publishers sometimes print only a small number of books and sell them as collectors editions. An example given was Madonna's book "Sex". Only a limited number was printed and they sold for high prices and since then it's become one of the most sought after books in the USA, according to the article. When they do this there's the implied promise that there will be no further printings

Yep, similar issue occurs with old Video Games + Software:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

A lot of these games were made decades ago, and can only run on decades-old hardware (which isn't being manufactured any more).

You occasionally get a great company like GOG.com, who tries to get the rights to the old games and make them work on newer systems, but even with all their resources, they still have trouble finding a lot of these copyright-holders.

The video game market is also an absolute TON of examples of who knows what game is owned by who, which small obscure company got bought by what, giant webs of mergers/acquisitions.... all mixed with a giant scoop of completely obsolete or incompatible hardware!

Example: "The Sad Story Behind A Dead PC Game That Can't Come Back".

* * *

I recently came across another completely new category I hadn't thought of before. Arcade+Pinball machines.

For example, this channel shows off thousands of their refurbished machines, and explain a lot of the history behind each one:

https://www.youtube.com/user/tntamusements/featured

You can refurbish the old stuff, but heaven forbid you try to take the ROMs and make your own duplicates!

Originally Posted by SleepyBob

Probably the clearest examples are outside of books -- photographs. Go to pretty much any old magazine, and you can find pictures that don't note the photographer, and many of these companies won't have records internally anymore for such "trivia". But they are still copyrighted.

There are plenty of old, weird pictures floating around the internet where people can't even figure out what the photo is about, much less who took it.

Heh, that reminds me of this Techdirt article, University Requires Students To Pay $180 For 'Art History' Text That Has No Photos Due To Copyright Problems.

Here is another article to toss on the Orphan Works reading list, "Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars":

Spoiler:

Missing Documentation

Photographs are another copyright quagmire. The University of California at San Diego library system, for example, houses more than 100,000 photos from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives. Ships, sharks, scientists: Those images document the past 100 years of marine science. But many of them were donated to Scripps without copyright documentation. That has limited the number of photos that the Scripps archives can share online.

[...]

Other colleges just aren't digitizing to begin with, because of the legal uncertainty around orphans. Many will look at collections they want to preserve—tapes crumbling into goo, papers fading—and "put them back into the box and hope someone decides what to do with them next year," says Jessica Litman, a law professor and copyright expert at the University of Michigan.