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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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My concern with changing copyright laws to require registration and renewal is that the law would need to account for private writings that would not be registered (because one of the functions of current copyright laws is allowing people to keep private correspondence/diaries/old manuscripts etc. from being published) and the fact that in this global economy such laws would arguably require international agreements and an international database to be effective.
BTW the grandfather's watch analogy started me wondering what the current prices would exist for original manuscripts from nearly any public domain author still being published by main-stream publishers.