I’ve been following copyright since I was first able to get on the web.
There is no excuse for copyright enforcement of orphaned works. The term itself is very accurate. An orphaned work is one where there’s no longer anyone who has legal ownership of the work even though its copyright term hasn’t yet expired. There’s nobody to pay royalties to, and there’s nobody who can claim control of the work.
In these situations, such works need to revert back to the public domain. Complying with C&D requests regarding an orphan work is actually copyright theft, as in the control of the work is being wrested from the public.
Some choice bullshit from the article:
It would “privilege” the public’s right to use our work.
No, it wouldn’t. It would privilege the public’s right to a work over random, acquisitive lawyer’s desires to control a work they have no right to.
It would allow others to alter your work and copyright these “derivative works” in their own names.
Just like it’s always been. It’s called transformative fair use, and has always been legal (if allowed less and less).
The demand for copyright "reform" has come from large Internet firms and the legal scholars allied with them. Their business models involve supplying the public with access to other people's copyrighted work. Their problem has been how to do this legally and without paying artists.Actually, for the most part, the demand for copyright reform is actually coming from artists themselves. Most of them have been negatively impacted by the DMCA, and its bullshit, unconstitutional safe harbor provisions which allow people to legally censor each other *without proving any legal standing*. Hundreds of millions of pieces of art have been taken down, and sometimes lost thanks to *the media corporations they're allies with* fraudulently claiming ownership of art that isn't theirs. This is why registration *should be mandatory*. Otherwise, we get what we have now, ie a system where anyone can claim copyright on anything and have it removed from the control of the actual creator.
