From a macro societal perspective, would this evolve "copyright" into a more balanced (value generating) deal for all of society?
> 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:
(previous example that I remember: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/05/27/companies/j... )
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.
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.
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”.