Rebecca Blood points to a Chronicle of Higher Education article on orphaned works. There’s a great deal of cost involved in finding the authors of many works, 22% of works in one case.
Five years ago Carnegie Mellon University’s library studied a sample of about 270 items from its holdings; librarians could not find the owners of 22 percent of the works.
With the 1976 Copyright Act, the law changed to grant copyright on creation of the work, rather than on the registration of the work with the Library of Congress. (Good thing, too, because it would be a pain to register every single paragraph post of a weblog, though I could register this as a never-ending compilation.) A side effect of this is that the authors of unregistered works, even of attributed works like this one, may not be so easy to find, and the works would be orphaned — abandoned children as it were.
Like any other abandoned properties, what should happen with these?