Sign Lessig's Petition
Larry Lessig has posted a "Reclaim the Public Domain" petition. My signature is the 910th one on the list, and people are signing it every minute! One thing that puzzles me, though, is this excerpt from the letter:
One solution in particular that we ask Congress to consider is the Public Domain Enhancement Act. See http://eldred.cc This statute would require American copyright owners to pay a very low fee (for example, $1) fifty years after a copyrighted work was published. If the owner pays the fee, the copyright will continue for whatever duration Congress sets. But if the copyright is not worth even $1 to the owner, then we believe the work should pass into the public domain.
Would the Public Domain Enhancement Act really work? Wouldn't the vast majority of copyright owners pay that dollar?
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re: pay that dollar
most people might not bother. and many, if asked, might make a decision to release it simply by not having to act. on the other hand, those same people might not go to the trouble to officially release something into the public domain.
the one real problem that i see with this, though, is how do we know what has been released to the public domain and what has not?
how do we know
you said
"how do we know what has been released to the public domain and what has not?"
Yes, exactly. We need some kind of public domain database...but who would maintain it? Who would pay for it?
copyright retention/from Jan Bone
One of the problems I see is that often authors (I'm one of them) have assigned their original copyright rights to the publisher(s) of their works. It's the publisher--or whoever the company has assigned the rights to--who has them now. So although the author might be willing to pay to keep the copyright in force, he or she may also have no way of knowing just what copyrights have been assigned, for what fees, and what terms.
In my case, although much of my writing has been "work for hire" freelance contracts in which I have no copyright stake, I still have eight books in print, and the copyrights to them (seven are mine; one's with a co-author) were assigned as far back as 1974--that's before the present copyright act--to National Textbook Co., which became Contemporary Books, which became something else, and which now is, I think, McGraw-Hill.
I'm willing to bet that every author in the anthologies/readers you may be using has gone through similar situations, in which the publisher has sold/granted the reproduction rights for fees. So at what point does the time frame for expiration begin, if the anthology itself has been copyrighted AS a compilation, and at a date different from the multi-dates of the original copyrighted pieces?
Jan Bone, author and university adjunct at Roosevelt University, Chicago suburbs. Adjunct in composition and in psychology.