Judge Richard Posner blogs, sitting in at Lawrence Lessig’s.
While he can’t talk about pending cases, Judge Posner can revisit Eldred address intelligence reorganization and discuss fair use:
Licensing and Fair Use
the problem for people like Eldred who want to publish old works (works that would have entered the public domain by now were it not for the Act) is transaction costs, not license fees: the costs of locating and negotiating with the current copyright owner. Those costs may well exceed the modest commercial returns from publishing a public domain work (which anyone can copy). The beauty of the old (pre-1976) copyright system, with its requirement of renewal beyond a shortish initial term (like 28 years), was that most copyrights, lacking commercial value by the end of their initial term, were not renewed, and so fell into the public domain, and so licensing costs fell to zero.
if someone copies my copyrighted book, that doesn
