Oprhaned Works

An "orphaned work" is a creative work where the copyright holder doesn't care or doesn't exist. However if an orphaned work is then preserved it may gain value at a future date which would be a great incentive for the copyright owner to re-appear to exploit the value while simultaneously taking legal action against the the preservationist.

In the past when culture was stored on paper and transferred by the human voice, and copyright terms were very small this was less of a problem.

On the other hand we are still preserving more than we ever did in the past

Slashdot News Story | Copyrights and CD-Rs Endanger Audio History

SEWilco writes "A study by the Library of Congress has found that many audio recordings are being lost due to copyright restrictions and temporary media. Old audio recordings are protected by a various US state copyrights, so it's hard for preservationists to get and copy material...