[ssivark]

Just a thought... would it make sense to maintain a govt/central registry of copyright owners, and have an "official" means of contacting them, on which they have an SLA to respond (say 3 months) which might be part of the ground rules for maintaining rights.

From a macro societal perspective, would this evolve "copyright" into a more balanced (value generating) deal for all of society?

[helterskelter]

I have no idea how accurate this comment from last week is, or if it applies beyond games, but the model is interesting:

> Japan has a scheme for orphaned games where if you can prove you did due diligence in searching for a rightsholder and couldn't find one, you can go ahead with rereleasing the game and the royalty payments get held in escrow by the government in case the rightsholder comes forward. I wish the US had something similar for cases like these.

Source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877983#45878084

[ghaff]

At least with books, it's mostly individual authors who are most opposed to orphan works legislation. Disney isn't going to forget about whatever legal hoops are needed to maintain copyright. Individual authors (or their estates) may well do so.

[ajkjk]

hearing about Japan doing things intelligently gives me such a warm fuzzy feeling.

(previous example that I remember: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/05/27/companies/j... )

[graemep]

Its not practical. Lots of things are copyright by default. HN comments are covered by copyright. Every photo you take is covered by copyright, so are letters contracts, kids drawings as well as professional artists,.....

What would work is an orphan works exemption, whereby if a work is not available and its not possible to trace the copyright holders you could use it.

The other problem is the term of copyright is far too long. it is ridiculous that something written during the reign of Queen Victoria could remain in copyright into the 21st century in the UK and EU. US law is slightly saner (in avoiding bringing out of copyright works back into copyright) but not much.

[jll29]

The whole basis of licensing law is everything is forbidden unless you have a written license permitting it from the copyright owner.

This is contrary to most (all?) other parts of the law where everything is allowed that isn't forbidden.

So it's the right of authors to ignore email requests to discuss a re-publication if they so wish.

[BrenBarn]

It is, but I think what the comment you're replying to is saying is that the world might be better if things didn't work that way.

[ozim]

Given experience with OSS contributors burnouts we can see how world would not be better.

[ozim]

Oh how naive.

We have that in place for open source software. No one is contacting the authors on GitHub they just grab and use it.

Second thing is big bad guys will see if someone copyright is just a person that doesn’t have means to fight for themselves in court - you still have to sue them and still have to get initial cost of lawyers.

Last but not least there is a lot of content that you don’t want to be easily tied to the owner because history is showing us how that can be used to hunt down people having “wrong ideas”.