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would be required to register the work and pay a small fee. If he paid
the fee, he got the benefit of the full term of copyright. If he did not,
the work passed into the public domain.
We called this the Eldred Act, but that was just to give it a name.
Eric Eldred was kind enough to let his name be used once again, but as
he said early on, it won’t get passed unless it has another name.
Or another two names. For depending upon your perspective, this
is either the “Public Domain Enhancement Act” or the “Copyright
Term Deregulation Act.” Either way, the essence of the idea is clear
and obvious: Remove copyright where it is doing nothing except
blocking access and the spread of knowledge. Leave it for as long as
Congress allows for those works where its worth is at least $1. But for
everything else, let the content go.
The reaction to this idea was amazingly strong. Steve Forbes endorsed
it in an editorial. I received an avalanche of e-mail and letters
expressing support. When you focus the issue on lost creativity, people
can see the copyright system makes no sense. As a good Republican
might say, here government regulation is simply getting in the way of
innovation and creativity. And as a good Democrat might say, here the
government is blocking access and the spread of knowledge for no
good reason. Indeed, there is no real difference between Democrats
and Republicans on this issue. Anyone can recognize the stupid harm
of the present system.
Indeed, many recognized the obvious benefit of the registration requirement.
For one of the hardest things about the current system for
people who want to license content is that there is no obvious place to
look for the current copyright owners. Since registration is not required,
since marking content is not required, since no formality at all
is required, it is often impossibly hard to locate copyright owners to ask
permission to use or license their work. This system would lower these
costs, by establishing at least one registry where copyright owners
could be identified.
As I described in chapter 10, formalities in copyright law were re-
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