Given the purpose of copyright (to increase the public domain), experience with "lifetime+N" indicates subtle bad effects. That is, without a lot of research, you can't tell if something is in copyright or has entered the public domain. Finding the author is the first obstacle, then finding out if and when the author died is next. The ultimate effect is to keep people from re-using things that almost, but not quite certainly, have entered the public domain.
A fixed term, with required notices, would be a lot better for our purposes in the USA.
Ironically, the last time I ran into this issue personally was discussing with David Friedman (son of Milt) access to several of his referenced papers. One (of which he was the author) had been published in a collection by (the now deceased) Julian Simon. Friedman wrote:
"The optimum population piece was published in one of Julian Simon's books, and he, unfortunately, is no longer alive, so I don't know how I would get permission to web it."
This suggests a few things to me (a lack of clarity on the part of an author over rights to his own works, a surprising lack of knowledge of copyright or rights management, generally, etc.). But it's a quite tangible instance of an author of a work stymied by the question of copyright status due to the death of a publisher / editor.
I'm not buying that - he knows perfectly well how to contact the publisher or find out who's administering Simon's literary estate (most likely his wife), and the DMCA means he could put it up on his website and wait to see if anyone lodged any objection to his doing so (which they almost certainly won't).
> the DMCA means he could put it up on his website and wait to see if anyone lodged any objection to his doing so (which they almost certainly won't).
Wrong. The DMCA provides safe harbor for online service providers. It provides no safe harbor for those who personally reproduce a copyrighted work, on an online service or otherwise. Rather, it increases the penalties if such reproduction is infringing. And I don't see how David Friedman is under any obligation to take such a risk or research the status of a work to which he owns no rights, did not author, and does not benefit from.
Ok, I misread the post to read that Milton was the author, but apparently he was not relevant. Still, unless David had reserved rights to the piece it doesn't really change his position much. The DMCA has no application and this distortion of its so-called "safe harbor" provision needs to die.
I have worked with public domain texts and you are exactly right, it is extremely valuable to be able to ascertain the copyright status of a work based purely on the date of publication (you don't even have to know the date of first publication if the date of publication you do know is early enough).
To paraphrase a comment I made on an earlier HN thread about copyright:
Consider a short story published in a literary journal last week. Allow a copyright system to exist that covers each eligible work for 30 years by default, and allows multiple extensions of 5 years at a cost of $1000 per extension per work, up to a maximum total copyright term of 100 years.
Someone in 2047 discovers a copy of this particular journal issue, which has now become obscure. They identify that this short story, though never being given acclaim, has had a subtle yet profound cultural influence. They decide to republish the story in their own commercial magazine, but want to check if the copyright has been extended. If it has not, the story is in the public domain. If is has been extended, the story is still covered by copyright.
They can search the central registry for the title of the short story and the name of the author. But they also have to search for the names of the editors of the journal, because it isn't clear whether or not the copyright stayed with the author or was transferred to the journal as part of the submission process. In fact, the copyright might have been granted to the owner of the journal, which may be an individual or may be an institution. The entry for the copyright might be under the title of the short story, or under the title for the journal, or under the title of that particular issue of the journal.
Furthermore, the author of the story, if they retained the copyright, may have submitted the story under a pen name, and/or may have registered the copyright of the short story under a different title than the title they used to submit to the journal, or the title might have been changed by the editors.
Or, the author, after having the short story accepted by the journal, may have sold it to a publisher who published it in a short fiction anthology, the copyright for which is registered completely separately and is essentially invisible to our hypothetical future researcher.
Any of these agents might have extended the copyright. It would be extremely difficult to prove to a high degree of certainty that the story was or was not covered by copyright.
Assign each copyrighted work a unique identifier and require that unique identifier to be included along with the copyright notice on the work. Now all you have to do is punch that unique identifier into the copyright database and see what its current status is.
Building a great search engine is still a hard research problem but building a search engine good enough to solve that problem is within the skills of any good fresh CS grad with a month to work on it.
If the Library of Congress is registering copyrights as proposed, then LOC has the database and the search terms will just be the work you propose to copy. It can be a simple service where you upload a few pages of text and LOC responds in a few seconds with the name of anyone who has registered copyright.
A fixed term, with required notices, would be a lot better for our purposes in the USA.