How to solve the Berne Problem, part 1

The conference on Orphan Works & Mass Digitization, hosted by the Law School at the University of California, Berkeley last week, was exciting — at least to the 230 copyright geeks like me who attended — and filled with well-researched papers.  The three White Papers that were prepared by the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic (written by former Duke Scholarly Communications Intern David Hansen) are well worth reading.  In this first post I want to look at a basic terminological issue and then focus on two general observations from the event.  In a subsequent post I will describe three specific suggestions made by conference speakers for solving the orphan works problem.

It is the phrase “orphan works problem” itself that sparked terminological debate.  Several speakers were uncomfortable with that expression, and an alternative – “hostage works” – seemed to gain some traction among participants.  But the suggestion that really got to the root of the issue was that we should refer to the proliferation of works still in copyright protection but for which no rights holder can be located as the “Berne problem.”  This is appropriate because the problem was so severely exacerbated by U.S. adherence to the Berne Convention in 1988 and the legislative changes that that decision required.  Four steps contributed significantly to the problematic situation we are currently in:

  1. The move to automatic protection, which often makes people into rights holders against their will and without their knowledge,
  2. Copyright term extension, which inevitably makes heirs or successors-in-interest into rights holders, again often unawares,
  3. The end of the renewal requirement, so that rights holders no longer have a chance to indicate their continued interest in a work; thus no “abandoned” works move any longer into the public domain,
  4. The end of the registration requirement, which now makes locating rights holders so much more difficult.

The combined effect of these changes to U.S. copyright law, all accomplished between 1978 and 1989, has been to create a huge class of orphan works.  So it is not surprising that many of the suggestions for how to deal with the problem pushed toward reversing or mitigating some of these changes.  Registries, for example, were a common theme; under these various proposals to create registries to assist in finding copyright holders for different types of works, we would simply be recreating (hopefully more efficiently) the registration database of the Copyright Office, which once could claim mandated comprehensiveness but unfortunately can do so no longer.

The first observation from the conference is that nearly all of the speakers (except the industry representatives and Registrar of Copyright Maria Pallante) seemed to think that legislation to solve orphan works is probably impossible and likely a bad idea.  The political climate in Washington makes attention to copyright issues unpalatable, and the proposal we saw several years ago was unattractive to many of the speakers.  Instead of newly created legislative schemes, potentially with burdensome and impractical requirements, many of the speakers looked for small changes that could be accomplished either in common law – by action of the courts, that is – or by simple legislative amendments to portion of the law as it currently stands.  In our next post we will examine some of these more modest suggestions.

Closely related to this distrust of the legislative process as a path for solving orphan works was a clear distaste, again expressed by multiple speakers, for solutions that would create a regime of extended collective licensing (ECL).  Such ECL programs would, of course, require a complex legislative enactment, and examples where such programs are in place were widely considered failures on a practical level; a professor from Canada, which has such a plan, was especially clear that this is not a workable option.  On the level of policy, an ECL scheme, where potential users of orphan works apply to some government-authorized board for permission and pay a fee, was denounced as economically inefficient.  The purpose of legislative licensing schemes is to facilitate the transactions so that users can find owners and owners benefit from the uses.  With orphan works, of course, there is no owner to be found so no transaction like this is actually facilitated.  Instead, the fee that would be paid to some collective organization would amount simply to a tax on use, with no economic benefit or incentive for creators at all.  One speaker refer to this sort of approach as similar to the medieval practice of selling indulgences, based on a dogmatic conviction that all unauthorized uses are a form of “sin.”  Any program based on such a foundation, rather than on solid economics, incentives for creation and cultural development, would be bad policy from the copyright point of view.