On Vox: Orphaned copyrights & Burning Man..

So I had dinner with my dear friend, and Lawrence Lessig's mortal enemy, Chris Castle last night at Benares.  First off, that is definitely one of the best nouveau Indian restaurants in history... amazing meal and fascinating conversation. He's quite active - opposed to Lawrence of course - on the Orphan works/copyrights.  Talking to him made the debate much more interesting to me - especially in consideration that my wife and I own quite a few copyrights between us.  His take on libraries and schools is quite interesting too - essentially free use for ANY non commercial use for works which were already public... but the catch is how to define libraries and museums and to avoid the GOOGLE MUSEUM locking up materials. 

Essentially the question is, how hard should people be made to work to find copyright owners, and should the lack of ability to find them make the works unusable.  When we made Who Killed the Electric Car? we had serious issues on this due to our desire to use some footage of which provenance was at best hazy. It's a very real issue in the world of digital where everything has potential permanence.  At the BBC, we think about this a lot vis a vis the Archive.  Many of the rights holders in some of that material would be quite hard to find or could actually be quite in need of compensation.  Personally, I come down in the middle some place: I think content should be able to be experienced, and that there should be simple ways to find/register copyrights as well as simple ways to set aside part of revenues for future claims.   But I don't think we should lock anything up in a vault. Vaults are cold dark places and frankly I'm claustrophobic.

So this a.m., since my foot is still quite swollen, I was drifting around the blogosphere and suddenly remembered I'd suggested going to Burning man with an old friend. The idea is recapturing momentum in my small brain. I think I'm going to go, I need a break, a solo break with 20,000 of my closest non-friends.. and a few close ones. My fear is that it's just a mid life crisis rearing its head - but optimistically I think I need some spiritual/mental space.

It could be a blast - given the right group of friends.. hmmm...

Originally posted on rxdxt.vox.com