alt Hacker NewsI think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.
It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.
(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)
Let's work through this statutory licensing concept.
A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway.
But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something.
Who do you pay? How do you pay them?