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You don't have to respond. You just have to acknowledge that you've received the request and that you still wish to hold the copyright.

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Why should I pay to respond because you want to use my copyrighted material? You're the one with the request, I don't have to respond to it. You want a guaranteed response, you pay me for that response.

How about you pay me to respond to you instead? At copyright attorney rates for my region. You send my attorney a request and your billing information, and he'll reply to you on my behalf and send you the invoice for his time.

Otherwise people will be able to cause huge financial impositions by essentially DDOSing people with copyright requests. You want a guaranteed response, you pay for that response in advance, otherwise kick rocks.

Then everyone will just use an auto-reply service.

Which would be fine, because those services still cost money and/or require maintenance. There would still be a way to track down the owner of the copyright. You could even make it part of the law that the respondent must be the copyright holder or have had contact with the copyright holder within the last X days.

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