This is me eating crow.
I have taken down my previous blog post regarding the proposed new copyright regulations, and I apologize for not digging deeper into this myself. Rob Balder was kind enough to provide me with the following links to:
The actual report from the Copyright Office. Note: This is a pdf.
My apologies to the internets for dispensing misinformation.
They’ve at least started to consider what a “diligent search” might consist of, something that did not exist in the earlier forms of their discussion. But I’m not pleased about several parts of this draft. The Copyright Office seems to have utterly abandoned, as their reason for being, the protection of creators’ rights, and shows far more concern for encouraging corporations, including academic institutions, to take advantage of mass digitization. They are far more concerned about the cost to organizations of a diligent search, than about the cost to individuals whose work is stolen and who try to oppose such theft. The removal of ability to gain legal costs from illegal users is a serious problem which they dismiss on the grounds that users will recover a license fee. Evidently they haven’t compared what we get to what lawyers get lately.
I don’t think the “diligent search” discussion went far enough. I would like to see specific mention of a) existence of robust internet piracy that may confuse such a search by assigning authorship to others at torrent sites, b) internet search via a minimum of two search engines on all known pen names as well as the author’s legal name, c) requirement for publishers to maintain permanent file, searchable by author, of all work they have published that has not already entered public domain, this file to be copied to the Copyright Office upon any change in name, d) requirement for agencies to maintain permanent file searchable by name of all clients past and present, and works they represented, this file to be copied to the Copyright Office at any change of agency name or dissolution thereof d) requirement for potential users to search publisher records and agency records where known, e) where a permanent government ID exists, a requirement to search the relevant death records file. From my point of view, if a potential user thinks the diligent search costs too much, the potential user should give up on trying to use the work. We the writers (and artists) did the work of thinking up, creating, refining the whatever…if they want to use it, they can do the work of finding us (it’s much easier than it was pre-internet) and enter negotiations.