In the bill's latest form, the tax would have been a multiple-time affair, a sum of US$1 per work charged 50 years after the date of first publication or on December 31, 2006, whichever occurs later, and every 10 years thereafter until the end of the copyright term, only on works first published within the United States (as charging it from foreigners would violate the Berne convention except in some interpretations of the Berne three-step test).
Failure to pay the Copyright Office the copyright renewal fee on or before the date the fee is due or within a grace period of 6 months thereafter would allow the work to irreversibly lapse into the public domain in the United States and other countries and areas applying the rule of the shorter term of the Berne Convention.
The Act would also require the Copyright Office to maintain an easily searchable database, so that for works that the original publisher still wishes to maintain copyright on, potential derivative creators can find out who paid the US$1 tax and negotiate with them for permission.
Opposition to the Public Domain Enhancement Act comes from the entertainment industry sphere, particularly the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its lobbyists.
In his book Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig lays out the reason for the MPAA opposition to the bill: Proponents such as Lessig have suggested that copyright holders may be motivated to oppose the PDEA by a competitive threat: a huge wave of abandoned works would spill into the public domain which could form the basis of new derived works that would compete commercially with established copyrighted works.