The orphan works problem and the future of intellectual property

Abstract

The paper describes the orphan works problem and advocates putting into practice in the EU the ideas of Prof. Laurence Lessig of Stanford Law School who proposes to address the orphan works problem, along with the problem of the excessive duration of copyright, by going back to the idea of the original copyright and the subsequent copyright renewal embedded in the Statute of Anne. After the initial 14-year term of automatic protection, the rightholder would be required to register the work for a marginal fee to be grated another 14-year protection term. The system would result in the creation of a publicly searchable database, similar to those that exist under patent law.