[h2o-discuss] IPR abandonment?

[Eric Eldred <eldred@mediaone.net>]

Can intellectual property be legally abandoned?

Examples:

The owners of the trademark to Formica find the
word has entered the public domain?

A professor wishes to give away the source code
to the UCSD Pascal operating system and goes to 
court to show the Regents of the University of
California have abandoned their copyright by
not maintaining access or even proper purchases
of the software, for x number of years?

Eldritch Press wants to publish a translation of
a Lermontov novel, done by somebody named Martin
Parker and published in 1949 in Moscow.  Since the
GATT copyright changes mean that Parker could
reclaim the copyright even if the work had entered
the public domain in the U.S., Eldred seeks to
find Parker to get permission.  It turns out nobody
knows what happened to Parker--maybe the gulag.
Can Eldred seek a ruling on legal abandonment of
the property to protect the investment in time of
publishing the work?

Win Singvan Gough paints in 1990 in France
"Nude Lawyers Picnic", which is sold at auction
for $150 million to a Japanese construction magnate
who keeps the painting locked up, and who jokes
that since the estate taxes in Japan would be
$25 million, he has instructed that the painting
be destroyed when he dies.  After his death in 
1991 the painting cannot be found in inventory
of his assets, and a Japanese court rules the
painting no longer exists in law.  In 1998 a
museum wishes to display something called
"Copy of Nude Lawyers Picnic".  Can the museum
go to court to prove that the copyright on
the original died with the legal death of the
the original, and therefore the copyright holders
cannot restrain publication by others of copies?

I think ordinarily one would say that forcing
a copyright holder to register a renewal of a
copyright serves the purposes of showing that
the property has not been abandoned, i.e. that
it has at least as much value as the registration
costs.  But now we have the situation where the
law waves its hands and rules that copyright can
be extended without the need for active renewal
registrations, and as in the GATT provisions
takes property which has legally entered the
public domain and makes it automatically 
copyrighted again--even if the copyright holders
have no interest or have ceased to exist.

Seems to me that a theory of abandonment as with
real and personal private property would serve
some useful functions in maintaining public access to
intellectual property.  But I'm not a lawyer and
don't have access to the same research tools.....

-- 
"Eric"    Eric Eldred      Eldritch Press
mailto:EricEldred@usa.net  http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/
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