Public Domain Enhancement Act - Impact

Impact

In the bill's latest form, the tax would have been a multiple-time affair, a sum of US$1 per work charged 50 years after the date of first publication or on December 31, 2006, whichever occurs later, and every 10 years thereafter until the end of the copyright term, only on works first published within the United States (as charging it from foreigners would violate the Berne convention except in some interpretations of the Berne three-step test). Failure to pay the Copyright Office the copyright renewal fee on or before the date the fee is due or within a grace period of 6 months thereafter would allow the work to irreversibly lapse into the public domain in the USA and other countries and areas applying the rule of the shorter term of the Berne Convention. However, if payments are made in time, the copyright may extended to the end of the normal maximum term, currently 95 years for a work made for hire. In practice, this would resemble copyright renewal under the Copyright Act of 1909, but the bill will create a 50-year term renewable five times for 45 years.

The problem that the law attempts to solve is that the cost of locating the owner of a work is often prohibitive. For works that are still in print, this is usually not a problem, but otherwise there is typically not a clear record of whether the original creator transferred the rights, died, or had a clear successor to its rights. The PDEA solves this problem by requiring a small tax to maintain copyright on a work. For works that the copyright owner no longer cares about, the copyright will lapse, and so copies and derivatives can be made freely. The Act would also require the Copyright Office to maintain an easily searchable database, so that for works that the original publisher still wishes to maintain copyright on, potential derivative creators can find out who paid the US$1 tax and negotiate with them for permission.