And I’m very sorry for ma very bad practice of English

According to the legislation, it will start running at the point when a book is entered in a database to be set up and operated by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France). [See Article L. 134–3]

‘Six months after the time when the book is entered in the database … the right to authorize its reproduction and display in digital form is to be exercised by a collecting and licensing society …’

‘Lorsqu’un livre est inscrit dans la base de données … depuis plus de six mois, le droit d’autoriser sa reproduction et sa représentation sous une forme numérique est exercé par une société de perception et de répartition des droits …’

During this period authors may opt out by objecting to the book’s inclusion in a written communication to the collecting and licensing society. [See Article. L. 134–4.]

Regulations for implementing the new legislation are to be specified in an order made in the Council of State. [See Article. L. 134–7.]

The use of “estimates” for orphan works bothers me a lot because of the conflict of interest between those who want to use works without compensating rights-holders and the rights-holders. As the Authors Guild demonstrated, many potential users will not exert even the slightest effort to determine whether copyright is still in force. (Google certainly made no effort in that direction: they digitized books of mine that were in print and in the stores.) There’s potential profit to be made; it’s easy to inflate an estimate to argue for such draconian legislation as this in France (and the earlier arguments in the US.) And the conflation of “out of print” with “out of copyright” simply must not stand. Authors cannot control whether a book goes out of print for a commercial publisher; they must be allowed to control its subsequent publication and distribution (and of course, the original publisher may bring the book back into print. Brief “out of print” periods should not risk the author’s rights.)

A more sensible approach (not that any government or corporation wants to take it) would have been to use the date at which copyright became automatically renewable, and make *that* the landmark date for calculating what is in and what it out of copyright. All work after that date is presumed to be copyrighted until its creator’s death-plus-70. All work before that date requires its creator or other rights-holder to opt out. In-print and out-of-print are irrelevant.

Papers and images of real historical value (e.g. first half of 20th c. and before) cannot fall under the “creator’s lifetime plus 70 years” of current copyright law and thus may be true orphans if the rights holder has died (or failed to renew copyright, then a requirement.) And true creative work–fiction and poetry, in our case–should never be subject to rights-grabbing in the name of salvaging “orphan” works. You can argue that the one surviving photograph of historical value has sufficient cultural importance to be worth using even though its photographer’s grandchildren might have a right (though not if it was taken before the time the copyright law changed.) But to let a government agency profit from someone’s novel by selling the movie rights to Disney while the author goes hungry? No. And to do that to writers not even in one’s own country? Double no.