I’d have to read the bill. But seeing as there hasn’t been any stories about it here…
After perusing the US copyright office’s website, the blog post appears to be in response not to any legislation currently in congress, but rather a report the USCO released June 4th this year with its recommendations for reforms to the law with regard to orphan works.
I’ve skimmed the document (which you can find here, warning 200+ page PDF) and the USCO is pretty much just saying orphaned works are a huge nuicance, they put content creators and the public at liability, there are ways to non-legislatively ameliorate this problem, and that there are legal reforms that work even better.
One of the solutions is “collective licensing” which basically means, if there’s a work and we can’t determine the rightful owner of it, then the government would become the licensing custodian. This is ridiculous, in my opinion, because it’d better serve the public good (and it hurts literally nobody) to just say the work’s no longer in copyright and belongs to the public domain. No licensing required at all.
I guess there’s a point to be made though that just because nobody can show that they’re the rightful owner doesn’t mean that the rightful owner might not step up in the future and claim the work. And once something has been put in the public domain it’s irreversible. So maybe the idea is that we call the government the custodian, it hangs onto and controls the copyright, and if someone proves their ownership in the future, then the copyright can be transferred back to them.
But seriously, that’s just convoluted. If you can’t be arsed to protect your interest in a work, even just by writing an email or making a phonecall to the USCO, then you ought not to have control of the work anyway as long as it’s valuable to the public. The government knocks down abandoned buildings far sooner than it public-domains works with no copyright owners. That is absurd. A physical building gets less consideration and shorter mercy time than the intangible rights to a piece of art.
