So, someone tell me again, WHY was registering copyrights a bad idea?

So a nice group of Glaswegians decides to stage Roddy McMillan's 1973 play,"The Bevellers." McMillan has been dead since 1979, but there's record of him having had more than one daughter -- and under European copyright laws, their permission is required before McMillan's play can be legally staged. The Citizens Theatre group -- the same company that staged the play successfully 33 years ago -- has revisited its own records and talked to everyine they can find who was involved with the original production. Nobody knows how to contact the daughters.

Citizens Theater is willing to pay royalties. They rightly fear being shut down mid-run owing to the capriciousness of one of the hard-to-locate daughters, but are electing to press on and assume that risk. I suspect that the company is publicizing the decision in hopes of flushing out the apparently distant daughters.

Were there an international copyright registry this would not be a problem. Were we to require the creators and/or heirs and/or assigns to pay a modest fee (calibrated to the costs of maintaining the registry, I'm thinking a handful or two of dollars or euros) to maintain their onging rights in creative works, well-meaning folk like the Citizens Theatre troupe could log on to the registry, and quickly figure out whether a) the work remained under copyright; and b) who to pay (and where they live, and how they prefer their checks to be made out).

Berne probably forever blasted apart the possibility of such a common-sense approach to copyright. And Citizens Theatre is left wondering it can do the one thing we are reasonably certain Roddy McMillan would want them to do -- actually stage the play he labored over and poured his heart into.

We do well to question a copyright regime that threatens productions simply because of its administrative inefficiencies.