James Boyle’s latest comment on the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) proposal was to extend the length of an existing set of intellectual property rights for broadcasters (and webcasters.)

Copyright offices around the world admit that there is a huge problem with “orphan works” – copyrighted material for which the copyright holder cannot be found. Given the absurdly long copyright term, it is quite possible that the majority of the cultural production of the twentieth century consists of orphan works. Because of the difficulty of clearing copyright, those works remain locked up in the library. Even though the copyright holder has long disappeared, or would not mind, it is impossible to show the old movie, adapt the old book, play the old song, put the old poem in an anthology. Many libraries simply refuse to allow screening of movies until the copyright term has expired; probably no one would object, but the legal risk is too great.

Now imagine creating an entirely new layer of rights over everything that is broadcast or webcast, on top of whatever copyrights already cover the work. You find a copy of a movie in the library and manage, at great expense, to work out that it is in the public domain, or to get the copyright holder’s permission. Perhaps the work is covered by a Creative Commons license, granting you permission to reproduce. Not so fast! Even after trudging through all the orphan works problems in copyright, you would have to prove that this copy had not been made from a broadcast or webcast. More clearance problems! More middle-men! More empirically ungrounded state-granted monopolies! Just what we wanted. There are even some serious free speech problems.

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