RSS THE GOOGLE CASE & COPYRIGHT LAW
Copyright law is in a weird state these days. Thanks to the Sonny Bono Mickey
Mouse law, copyright protection for published works now extends for nearly a century (Sonny, as a congressman, made sure that
Disney's early creations would no go into public domain).
A good thing for writers, right? We like copyrights, we like being protected.
But copyrights shouldn't last forever. Sooner or later, the writer has been
long dead, and scholars and educators need more access to great literature (the not-so-great will be long out of print anyway).
And these days, out of print, yet still copyrighted material is creating a
new kind of problem: the problem of orphan work. As the NY Times explains it,
Orphan works are all those Brats whose copyrights are still active
but whose parents cannot be found. There are millions of them out there, and they are gumming up the world of publishing.
Suppose a publisher wants to print an anthology of 1930s magazine fiction. Copyright now lasts so long ... that the publisher
must assume that there are rights holders for all those stories. Suppose that half the owners can’t be found. What should
the publisher do? Its lawyers will advise abandoning the anthology: statutory damages for copyright infringement now stand
between $750 and $150,000 per instance.
This problem is taking a new dimension because of the digital/internet revolution.
Google wants to make, ultimately, a library of everything, digitized and available to readers and scholars. A good deal for
Google, but a good deal for everyone.
Right now, Google is facing a series of lawsuits from authors and publishers
over their digitizing of in-print books, and the case has been put on a Federal District Court calendar. The case will inevitably
take up the question of orphan copyrights -- of more than seven million works scanned by Google so far, four to five million
appear to be orphaned.
