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Originally Posted by shalym
Ok...so how do you define "economic life"? How do we (as regular consumers) know whether or not a book is in the public domain? Should the government create a database of books that are in the public domain? How does the government know? These days, copyright doesn't have to be "registered" anywhere in order for anything to be covered by copyright, so again...who keeps track of what books are or aren't in the public domain?
I think that we really need to go back to the days when copyright had to be registered, and renewed for a nominal fee every 10-20 years or so. If it's not renewed, then it goes into the public domain. Any work could be renewed forever, which would satisfy those who want to keep control of popular works, and it would solve the problem of orphan works.
Shari
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I agree with you. Go back to the days were copyright had to be registered and the copyright office had to be give a couple of copies of the book, I would even go so far as to say an electronic copy of the book in a commonly accepted format. Renew the copyright every X years.
I will say that when this particular scheme was mentioned, the push back was that after an author has more than a few books, it can be very difficult to keep track of when copyrights should be renewed, so I would allow an author to renew all his or her copyrights at the same time. I would also create a searchable database of copyrighted works.
The push back is that it would likely violate the copyright treaty and there really isn't a big push to change things.