The Return of Orphan Works: A Review of the 2008 Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act Part 1

Reblogged from MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY:

In the aftermath of the Google Books debacle, we are starting to hear noises that Google will back a new orphan works bill in this Congress.  There are some commentators—truly misguided in my view—who are calling for Congress to bring back the failed legislation from 2008 known as the “Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act”.  (The late Shawn Bentley was a tech industry lobbyist and former Senate Judiciary staff counsel.)  Let’s review that legislation in light of what we now know. 

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The orphan works issue is back and being jammed through the UK Parliament right now

5 thoughts on “The Return of Orphan Works: A Review of the 2008 Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act Part 1”

      • I think it means that they deemed scholarly works as so valuable they should be free, That and they want the authors to subsidize the education of college students.

        What I guess I don’t get… Copyright does not claim ownership of ideas. The college professors who are getting paid to teach could simply read the works, and then teach it with their own expression and own writings – even use pieces of the article in fair use (graph or snippets of text). But we seem to encourage laziness. Instead of the teacher teaching, he just hands out the works of others and let that scholar doing the teaching instead. So these scholars are effectively teaching parts of a course with no compensation.

        Anyhow, I’m not sure this has much to do with the current article about orphaned works. Just caught the part about Canada in the article, and running across this article makes me question how they mangle the word “balance”.

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