@Lempkee: the way I read it was that someone is going to collect opinions---and nothing more---about what to do with material where the original author is (nearly) impossible to get hold of. Whether that means automatically putting it into the public domain is quite another story.
I sense you resent the ideas behind it, but if I am allowed to play the devil's advocate for a moment, the fact that an author could not be tracked down and apparently does not respond to various requests also indicates he has lost respect for his own work too: if he had simply said 'all requests, in whatever form, are denied', the matter would be closed there and then.
