Book People Archive

Lawrence Lessig's "Orphan Works Maintenance Requirement" proposal

Lawrence Lessig recently published a proposal for changes in copyright law,
intended as a counter-proposal against the US Copyright Offices' own "orphan
works" proposal.  Orphan works are works that have faded into obscurity long
before their copyrights run out, and that now cannot be reused because
the current copyright owners cannot be traced.  The copyright office's
"orphan works" proposal can be found at

    http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

A short text summary of Lessig's proposal, a longer video presentation,
and some interesting followup discussion from commenters, can be found on his
blog at

    http://lessig.org/blog/archives/003696.shtml

There's also a followup post at

    http://lessig.org/blog/archives/003709.shtml

that focuses more specifically on issues of originality and reuse.  (The
comment thread on that one isn't as interesting to me as the one on the
initial post, and the comments on the proposal itself seem to have trailed
off by now in both threads.)

He's interested in knowing what folks in the greater library community
(which I'll take to include the general Book People membership) think of
these issues.  I have some thoughts on his proposal myself, but for now
I'll hold back so I can hear other folks' reactions.

John