Lawrence Lessig's proposal on "orphan works"

Counter to a bill currently before the US Congress, foreseeing an excuse for copyright infringers from significant damages if they can prove that they made a "diligent effort" to find the copyright owner, Lawrence Lessig suggests in an article published in the New York Times that:
- the copyright owner, after a 14-year period, should be required to register a work with an approved, privately managed and competitive registry and pay $1
- this rule should not apply to foreign works, or to work created between 1978 and today
- photographs and other difficult-to-register works should be subject to this rule depending on the technology available, both to develop simple registration databases and to make research handy and reliable.