Mark Thoma sends us to Hal Varian:
Copyrights That No One Knows About Don’t Help Anyone - New York Times: Since there is no requirement to register a work and a copyright lasts so long, the legal owner of a work can be difficult to find, particularly when the work is more than a few decades old. When some librarians at Carnegie Mellon University tried to request permissions to digitize a collection of out-of-print books, they were unable to find more than 20 percent of the rights holders, despite persistent efforts. Failing to locate rights holders can be costly since copyright infringement may be subject to statutory damages of up to $150,000 an incident....
[The Copyright Office proposed that] if you conducted a “diligent search” to locate a rights holder and still failed to find the owner, you would be off the hook. You could then incorporate the work in question into your own work, as long as you provided proper attribution. If the legitimate rights holder was subsequently found, he or she could not require that your work be withdrawn from circulation, but could collect “reasonable compensation” for use....
If easily accessible copyright registries existed, the courts would probably find that simply searching the registries would satisfy the diligent search requirement. Creators of works with commercial potential would then have strong incentives to register their works. In such a world, a legal requirement to register works could be redundant, since the commercial incentives to register would be strong....
Creating a registry is not that difficult from either a technological or a business perspective. The Copyright Clearance Center (www.copyright.com) was established by a group of publishers in 1978 to provide rights clearance for printed works. The Harry Fox Agency (www.harryfox.com) serves as a clearinghouse for those who want to make recordings of songs, and there are plenty of Web sites devoted to image search to ease the sharing of photographs...
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