I read this, got agitated, and then went looking about. There’s a lot of stuff that’s been written on the subject, the most prominent of which, to me, contains the exhortation that

It’s usually easier to keep rights than to try to get them back.

However, I’ve not been able to find support for the assertion that the only solution available to artists and other creators is the use of some private registration agent that doesn’t yet exist.

A copyright, presently, is automatic. A more easily defensible copyright can be gained by a filing with the Library of Congress, and is reasonably cheap and effortless. It’s not free, as I recall, so it’s also not as good as the de facto copyright already conferred by present law.

The trick here, and this is purely a matter of interpretation, is in the definition of “orphaned”. Someone claiming an item is orphaned won’t be enough to make it so. And someone copying a work, and then that copy being copied, also won’t turn a work into an orphan.

At least not based on anything I’ve found and read in the last half hour.

It appears as though the prime beneficiaries of the law won’t be MSFT and GOOG, but instead film makers, who are alleged to worry about using items that appear to be in the public domain, for fear of owing crippling and arbitrary retroactive royalties. Under the proposed law, they’d still be liable for royalties, but at a “Gee, I didn’t know that!” rate. And proving they didn’t know it will require them to show a decent amount of diligence in the effort. That effort, at a minimum, would include a web search to find the owner, and as a result, the existence of a simple dated web page claiming ownership with contact information for the owner would void any claim that a given work was orphaned.

Or so it seems to me.

So, while vigilance is required, I wonder if this is as bad as I’d first thought. Can you point me toward any sources that would disabuse me of the notions I’ve arrived at during my brief fling at understanding the issue?