In a dark corner of the Trans-Pacific Partnership lurks some pretty nasty copyright law

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[Commentary] The extent to which our international obligations interact with -- and may sometimes override -- domestic law is a pretty fascinating one, and is, for any number of pretty obvious reasons, increasingly in the news. Here’s a rather small footnote to the very large controversy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, involving a narrow (but actually quite important) bit of US copyright law, that nicely illustrates how complicated these questions can be -- a synecdoche, as it were.

The copyright issue relates to so-called “orphan works.” As a consequence of many factors -- the absurdly long term of copyright protection, along with the elimination of copyright notice, or copyright registration, requirements as preconditions for copyright protection -- there are literally millions upon millions of works -- books, letters, songs, articles, poems...-- created in the ’30s, ’40s, or ’50s that are (a) still protected by copyright, and for which (b) it is virtually impossible to ascertain who owns the copyright, or even whether the copyright is still in force.

[David G. Post is a Sr. Fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute]


In a dark corner of the Trans-Pacific Partnership lurks some pretty nasty copyright law