Public Domain Enhancement Act
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The Public Domain Enhancement Act (PDEA) (House Bill 2601 for the 108th congress, reintroduced as House Bill 2408 for the 109th congress) is a bill pending in the United States Congress which, if passed, would add a tax for copyrighted works to retain their copyright status. The purpose of the bill is to make it easier to determine who holds a copyright (by determining the identity of the person who paid the tax), and to allow copyrighted works which have been abandoned by their owners to pass into the public domain.
In the bill's current form, the tax would be a one-time affair, a sum of $1 per work charged 50 years after publication, only on works first published within the United States (as charging it from foreigners would violate the Berne convention except in some interpretations of the Berne three-step test). Failure to pay for three years would allow the work to irreversibly lapse into the public domain; if payment is made, the copyright is extended to the end of the normal maximum term, currently 95 years for a work made for hire.
This bill was first introduced in the House on June 25, 2003 by representatives Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and John T. Doolittle (R-CA) where it went to the House Committee on the Judiciary. On September 4, 2003, it moved to the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. On May 17, 2005 it was reintroduced by Lofgren as H.R. 2408, and was once again referred to the House Judiciary Committee.
The problem that the law attempts to solve is that the cost of locating the owner of a work is often prohibitive, which, contrary to the constitutional intent of copyright, decreases the incentive to create derivative works, and prevents historians and artists from being able to exploit works that have been abandoned; meanwhile, if the owner cannot even be located, he or she is presumably gaining little benefit from exclusive use of the work. For works that are still in print, this is usually not a problem, but for works that no longer have commercial viability, there is typically not a clear record of whether the original creator transferred the rights, died, or in the case of a defunct corporation, had a clear successor to its rights. The PDEA solves this problem by requiring a small tax to maintain copyright on a work. For works that the copyright owner no longer cares about, the copyright will lapse, and so copies and derivatives can be made freely. The Act would also require the Copyright Office to maintain an easily searchable database, so that for works that the original publisher still wishes to maintain copyright on, potential derivative creators can find out who paid the $1 tax and negotiate with them for permission.