LWN published that the Public Domain Enhancement Act has been reintroduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Zoe Lofgren. This law will partially fix the problem with copyrights that currently run up to 75 years after the death of the author, a very long time. This is important since only about 2% of the works older than 55 are commercially viable so we do not have access anymore to the old works under the current copyright regime.

The idea of this law is that after 50 years the copyright author will need to file a request to keep his copyrights and pay $1. This will allow commercially nonviable works to be released to the public domain and still not annoy the copyright giants too much.

I hope that this law will pass this time, and not be buried in a subcommittee.