Grazza
Super Moderator
Posts: 11451
Registered: 07-02 |
I don't think that is the purpose of this. It's for people who have rights of authorship to reclaim their copyright. If you didn't create something, you can't claim ownership of its copyright.
It has been quite an anomaly that a work can still be under copyright protection in Europe but public domain in the US. With a very global market nowadays, that causes serious problems, and strongly discourages a company from publishing such a work whether they hold non-US rights or not. If you publish in the US (where it is public domain) and don't hold the rights, then you can't sell abroad. If you hold the rights and publish abroad, then there's nothing to stop your US sales being trashed by a rival (or free online) edition, and copies of that US edition finding their way to your non-US customers. (Indeed, my own company has looked at a few such books and concluded "can/worms/bargepole".) So it makes sense to clear this up.
Of course, when a company has published a work in good faith given that it was public domain, it would be rather galling for them to lose the right to publish if a work becomes subject to copyright once again. You'd hope they wouldn't be unduly punished under this change. I've seen this discussed before somewhere (perhaps when such a change in legislation was being considered), and the thinking was that they'd be treated fairly.
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01-19-12 02:48 
