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Just to diverge a bit, one thing that I've noticed is that more and more of the older orphaned works are appearing in the Amazon Kindle store. After reading a different thread about national science fiction day and Issac Asimov, I did a few quick queries on some of the other golden age SF authors. Several of the authors have a number of books out there for a buck, which I'm willing to wager are not exactly authorized. My guess is that some people will throw scanned books up. Since Amazon will only take down if the copyright holder asks them to or people start complaining about the quality, the orphaned works tend to stay up.
So the two questions that occur to me is how can anyone tell if they are pirate or not? Amazon is a legit ebook store and most simply assume that anything for sale there is legit. It could simply be that some of those golden age works fell into public domain. The second question is if it's an orphaned work and no one is actively defending the copyright, what is the harm?
I actually went to a fair amount of effort to determine if ebooks versions of Roger Zelazny and Mary Stewart books were not authorized. Both are well known authors with active literary estates, but it wasn't straight forward to determine that they were actually unauthorized.
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