In this article Payments, Copyright & Legal Matters you will find a section and thesis how to solve the copyright problem:
The ideal solution would be to adopt an open standard for identifying music and artists using unique identifiers and giving everyone free access to them. A new non-profit organization could take advantage of the existing open databases and add a copyright ownership registry on top of this open data. The non-profit would then need to be able to resolve conflicting claims between copyright holders, which is a critical and rather costly task.
IMHO this thesis is missing a crucial point:
Every artist should have to confirm regularely that he/she** is still the copyright owner for a specific track. If such a confirmation is no more provided, the track looses any copyright protection and becomes available under some kind of CC0-license.
This seems to be the only way to oblige artists to register their copyright.
And this would also solve the “industries’ lack of motivation”.
The last confirmed copyright owner is responsible to license a specific song.
(**Of course, such a confirmation can be delegated to a Record Label or other organization.)
What do you think?
