As I recall, a lot of photographers were very opposed to orphan copyright law that was making its way through Congress at one point. The gist of the argument as I remember it was the concern that people would make a very perfunctory attempt to contact the copyright holder ("Oh, we would have asked for permission but we didn't have a current address so we just went ahead and used it.")

And the overall situation with photography on the Web is probably much worse than writing. Even sites that wouldn't condone unattributed cutting and pasting of text routinely use all sorts of photos that I'm sure have been casually copied from somewhere on the Web.

>However, approving having something deleted does not by itself make it an orphan work. After all, the copyright holder may have had it deleted in one place to publish it in another or had it removed so that it could be reworked into a new revision before being posted.

Destruction of a work I retain the copyright on is part of my [moral] right. For example an artist may not wish their earlier work to be seen, they should have the right to prevent it deleteriously affecting their reputation without that work being considered "orphaned" and fair game.

Reocities bringing back my teenage webpages may mean that people find things authored by me that I no longer want to be available, I took the appropriate course in letting Geocities wipe their servers; what right do Reocities have to recover that without my say so?

I don't care as it happens but I could and assuming that the servers are in a Paris Convention/TRIPS country I should win. TRIPS requires countries to treat commercial scale infringements as criminal!

FWIW safe harbour only works if you know you're not holding works for which you don't have the copyright or a license.

>Orphaned works are those where either the copyright owner no longer exists [...] or where there is no practical way to identify the proper copyright holder.

The former are orphaned if their estates or business successors can't be found. The later are not orphaned, they're just a PITA.

not to get too 'cooksource' or bolshy on you but why on earth would you have moral rights? why is this an issue of 'win'? you publicised your content, technology made a million copies of it, people found it useful to them to communicate it from one to another in various (licensed) formats. Your content was useful to society - potentially to thousands. Yet after splashing it all over the internet, you decide it's not worth monetising and so you get to tell everyone to delete it, no matter how useful and culturally important it is? at no gain to yourself but vast loss to society? Where does that come from, except an un-democratically ratified treaty?

As for what was above: I fully accept the issues over orphan works, I was just defending the Reocities iniatiative; by and large, the rebirth of utility in what really were orphan works.

>Yet after splashing it all over the internet, you decide it's not worth monetising and so you get to tell everyone to delete it

No, you only get to delete copies you have control over. If someone has received a copy of the document within their rights they are fine. However, in Europe we don't have personal fair use rights [to the same extent] as you do in USA (I'm guessing) - so keeping a personal copy of something you saw online is an infringing act.

Why moral rights? Well that comes to the heart of what you see copyright as for.

Moral rights are the most important part IMO, I see that those who create a work should have the right to distribute it or not as they see fit (once distributed their rights are [or at least should be!] exhausted over the distributed copies). But simply because I'm no longer distributing shouldn't give you the right to take that work from me.

A creator should also have the right to be named as creator (perpetually IMO, even beyond copyrights current terms). They should also have the right to control modification ("adaptation"), within the term, a limited version of this is obviously necessary if the right to be named as creator is there. I don't think you should have the right to write what you want and put my name on it (this clearly overlaps with other laws, eg libel).

Basically what you're saying is other creators content should be free (libre+gratis) for me because I think what I'm doing is right. IMO that's not your call.

One question, how do you [legally] differentiate Reocities from someone who takes your blog post and republishes it with ads? You may not have a problem with that (use CC or PD licenses in which case) but most would. [Now you've defined the difference you can start your campaign to get copyright altered.]

Shall we do trademark infringement now too .. Reocities is almost certainly infringing there too, if the owners have a lot of money I could see a RTM troll picking up the mark and going to town.

> No, you only get to delete copies you have control over. > so keeping a personal copy of something you saw online is an infringing act.

In other words, I'm right that you think that more than issuing content on licences that are revocable, allowing a person to instantly revoke all licences and be in their rights to totally withdraw something from circulation and speech in society, you go much further than contractual controls over speech and culture - you make it a moral right! you said:

>> Destruction of a work I retain the copyright on is part of my [moral] right.

I am not totally against moral rights, by the way. I do know exactly what they are, and am not from the US, or France, both of which see them slightly differently than here, the UK. But that's irrelevant. I agree with you about correct attribution. Note that misleading attribution is really not so bad. People lie all the time, and where lies cause damage, we have laws in place for that - e.g. contractual misrepresentation/negligent misstatement, fraud, libel. Why add a super-powerful moral right, capable of reaching through space and time, and activateable at your wish, for all of time (I assume if you want that right to be enforceable, you're saying it should be assignable to someone after your death, and theirs, ad infinitum)?

You forget that every citizen with a computer (including a smartphone) is now a publisher. Copyright law is very, very complex, and that's fine if it only affected professional publishers, as it once did, and helped create a market capable of self-regulating copying. But all of that has changed, hugely, now. Are you really considering my moral rights when you cite my post in the one you just published?

Furthermore, copyright is a bundle of rights that reaches through space and time to control how people communicate, and also how your digital devices (your own property) can interact (DRM, region controls, etc). For it to exist, we have to sacrifice, for the copyright term, rights to free communication, to efficient cultural diffusion, cheap education, cheap and simple factual accuracy (since things must be paraphrased, incriminating emails cannot be reproduced, etc). We chose to do that, but our legislators perhaps forgot about that sacrifice every time they extended copyright. Have a read of the economists' amicus curiae brief in Eldred v Ashcroft (supreme court) to see what Coase, Friedman, Arrow, Varian, Akerloff, Buchanan et al thought about just the economic aspect of it (let alone my points just now about nonmarket efficiency and rights to free and efficient speech).

>Basically what you're saying is other creators content should be free (libre+gratis) for me because I think what I'm doing is right. IMO that's not your call.

Basically, that's not at all what I have ever said or felt. See above where I said that new content should be created - even with all rights from copyright as it is - under an OPT OUT implied statutory license for NON-COMMERCIAL, ATTRIBUTED and SHARE ALIKE use. (I think this covers your next question, too, by removing the strawman you based it on)

> Shall we do trademark infringement now too .. Reocities is almost certainly infringing there too, if the owners have a lot of money I could see a RTM troll picking up the mark and going to town.

I'm sorry, what's your point here. That Reocities is bad, or that IP laws are on many occasions very negative things indeed?

"Moral rights" has a specific meaning in copyright law. It's not clear to me that enforcing destruction is covered as a moral right (although I can certainly understand the logic), but every content creator automatically has moral rights in the copyrighted content.

I of course mean Berne Convention, doh!