On ordinary days, s. 77 of the Copyright, dealing with orphan works (or in the Act‘s terms “owners who cannot be located”), is probably one of those provisions that get very little attention. But as Howard Knopf reports, not only did Canada’s orphan works regime get some unusual attention during the last couple of weeks, it also stirred some heated mini-controversy at the recent Fordham IP Conference.
Earlier this week I participated in the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology Symposium on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. I was part of a panel devoted to various solutions to the problem. Here is my presentation. The Orphans, the Market, and the Copyright Dogma At its core, copyright law is based on a very simple logic–market logic. The law grants limited exclusive rights in creative works, with the expectation that such rights will then be voluntarily exchanged in a decentralized market place. Whether we believe that exchange will provide the financial incentives for creating the works in the …