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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
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According to Larry Lessig, about 80% of works currently under copyright have no known rights owners.
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Sorry, taking that with a very large pinch of salt - does that apply to just books or to all published works, including electronic publishing? |
All copyrighted material--which includes all grammar-school essays written since 1963 or so. Shoeboxes full of vacation photos that wind up at thrift stores. Doodles in the margins of textbooks. Badly-edited home videos that got thrown out when the couple moved. Answering-machine recordings of the drunk guy trying to give directions to where he is now. Copied-and-shared email signature lines from 1994. ("The rest of this tagline is umop apisdn")
The vast majority of copyrighted material has no commercial value, and we are not better off as a culture for requiring permission to use it.
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And to further complicate matters, there's no penalty for claiming to hold a copyright when you don't.
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Oh sure there is, if you've profited from it. If you make an explicit penalty for the claim itself, then you're in danger of creating a situation of more money being the arbitrator of who owns copyright (more than at present, I mean).
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There's no penalty for claiming to hold copyright when you don't. There's only a penalty for infringing on someone else's copyright. There's no penalty for publishing a public-domain work, and claiming you own the copyright on it and that no part of it can be reprinted without your permission.
I'm not sure it's even illegal to get permission to publish, and then put your own copyright notice on a work that someone else owns. It's a violation to do this with CC works, because "attribution" is the most basic form of them, but I'm not sure there'd be anything illegal about, for example, contracting with Salinger to print a new edition of Catcher in the Rye, and announce in the inside, "Copyright [elfwreck] 2009; all rights reserved." (Odds of me getting Salinger to agree to this: very very VERY low. However, I could very likely get permission to reprint my father's college papers, were I able to find them, under my own name... which would give the impression of ~40 years more copyright protection than they should have.)
I'm not sure there's any law against putting a *false* copyright notice on a work, now that copyright notices aren't specifically required for the protection to apply.