Unclear copyright ownership guarantees extensive litigation over licensing

Third, even for commercially valuable works that are not orphaned, copyright ownership is far from clear for many works, making remuneration at scale destined for protracted litigation. While existing compulsory licensing regimes focus on areas of practice where licensing and transfer of rights has largely been standardized, most other areas of copyright do not have such clarity. For example, even with commercially published books, publication contracts, i.e., private agreements between authors and publishers, take a wide variety of approaches to allocating ownership rights across geographic locations, formats, and time. Whether, for example, using works as training materials for AI models would constitute an “electronic work” under those licenses would be an important question. This issue has been litigated and remains unresolved and largely unresolvable without close examination of each contract.57