Orphan Works
An article on digital library projects in the latest New Yorker has a helpful explanation of the orphan works problem:
A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between five and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.
Finding a legal resolution to the orphan issue is even more urgent in new media, where there are only decades, rather than centuries, to intervene before a work decays past any hope of restoration. An experimental program to grant individual licenses for the use of orphan works was launched last year in Canada, and may provide an example of how this can be made a standard feature of copyright law worldwide.