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 of termination rights) and permit parties other than the author (if the author is dead) to decide whether termination occurs.

Second, the reliance argument—that members of the public, having reasonably relied on the provisions of the author’s Creative Commons grant, are entitled not to have the grant terminated—is ultimately circular, because the public’s reliance is reasonable only if the grant is not subject to termination in the first instance. A court might just as readily reason that when members of the public receive a grant of rights under an open-content license, they do so with express statutory notice that all such grants are terminable and can have no reasonable basis for relying on the license being permanent.

Third, although Professor Loren correctly notes that the termination provisions seem to apply most naturally to arm’s-length transactions between two named parties, rather than an author’s release of rights to unknown (and unknowable) members of the public, the statutory text imposes no requirements as to the form of the parties’ transaction. Indeed, the statute is conspicuously broad; the termination power extends to any “exclusive or nonexclusive grant of a transfer or license of copyright or of any right under a copyright.” As one court recognized, “common sense, good business judgment and even a modicum of legal intuition dictate that a transfer should clearly name the transferee, [but] neither the statute nor the case law require it.”

In sum, although a new doctrine of limited copyright abandonment may avoid the risks that the termination provisions presently pose to users of works distributed under open-content licenses, it is far from clear that existing doctrine is sufficiently flexible to accommodate such a development. As an alternative, however, the courts may be able to justify limits on