Google Orphans: What Revenue Opportunities?

Mike Shatzkin (and I) look at some potentially untapped IP in the GBS orphan class: Link

"Let’s say there are 5 million orphan works and 1/2 of 1% of them are worthy of a press run of 5,000 or more. With a few bigger winners in there, let’s say that’s an average of 6,000 press run across the 25,000 estimated titles. That’s 150 million units. Average retail of $15, average discount of 50%, conservative royalty of 5% of retail calculates to $1.125 billion in revenue to publishers and $112.5 million in royalties.

"Cairns says that maybe these numbers are too high by a factor of ten. If he’s right, we’re still talking about $112.5 million in revenues to publishers and $11.25 million in royalties to authors. I have to believe those numbers are still larger than licensing revenues will be, although Cairns and I have not explored that more complicated question seriously yet. And the truth of the press run potential probably lies north of Cairns’s number (although perhaps south of mine.)

"Why was that element left out of the settlement? Did the negotiating parties even contemplate it? And exactly how useful is the “orphan” relief if this huge portion of the potential revenue (and public value) is omitted? Were the parties so fixated on electronic exploitation that they just didn’t notice this? "