"Collecteana"'s blog has some interesting commentary on the difficulties of preserving aging media. But I wonder... is preservation necessarily encouraged by making it easier for works to slide into the public domain? It depends on whether there is some collector waiting there to appreciate them, and whether the rights defining entry and exit from public domain precludes that collector from profiting from a restored version. As it is now, of course, copyright law does not pose an obstacle to someone's restoring a single copy.

The phrase, "copyright law is a blunt instrument," caught my eye. I have often used that description of law in general. It strikes me that it is less true of copyright than of many other forms of law. The sanctions for violating copyright are usually civil... it can be negotiated around and displaced by private agreement.... there are plenty of exceptions. And indeed part of the problem with copyright is not its breadth, but its fragmentation--the difficulty of pulling together the different rights all needed for a license.

What might be more true in this case is that the absence of a registration requirement (or other formalities) associated with a continued claim of copyright is something of a blunt instrument--it transforms anything written or imaged into a copyrighted product and potential orphan. But it seems that people in general are happy with the no-registration regime.