[WikiEN-l] Google Books settlement reached

[Andrew Gray]

2010/1/17 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> 2010/1/17 Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>:
>> Notice that it's opt-out, which for a real orphan work means no one
>> will opt-out. Preview is better than nothing, for us. (It was
>> unrealistic to expect Google to be able to offer full downloads.)
>
> Are orphan books that common? In most cases they have a clear single
> author who would have some interest and would likely be traceable no
> matter what happened to the publisher.

Well, yes and no. Traceable, but not easily traceable. There can
easily be a hundred years elapsing between the publication of a book
and the expiry of its copyright, which gives a lot of time to lose
people.

You *can* track down someone given a name from decades back, but for a
minor author who didn't get much publicity it's going to be a long,
slow, uphill struggle. If they're dead, you need to find their heirs,
figure out who actually owns the rights - potentially dozens of people
- which takes even longer.

And all too often, the trail goes cold. It's informative to look at
the equivalent situation in the financial sector - people who owned
shares, or insurance policies, or were left money in people's wills,
and turned out to be untraceable. In the UK alone, that comes to some
fifteen billion pounds - probably more -

http://www.uar.co.uk/benefit.htm
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/unclaimedassets_uacc.pdf

If that much is sitting around as realisable cash, what hope a few
intangible copyrights?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk