Do you think we'll start to see "orphan works trolls" that examine commercially successful orphan works (or their derivatives), try go find the copyright holders and get rights assigned and then sue so that they can make money? Hmmmmm...
Joe Gratz cuts right to the chase and posts the LoC's legislative proposal to solve the orphan works problem. I don't have time to read the 100+ page report, but would like to see a concise discussion of what the LoC found compelling and what they wrote off.
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Second, the profits would almost never justify the search costs. Remember -- if there was a reasonably diligent search, under the proposal, nobody gets statutory damages or attorney's fees, just an approximation of what the license fee would have been. The price the copyright holder charged the troll is evidence of what a reasonable fee is. So it would be unusual, I think, for the fee paid by the user to the troll (or for the sum of all the fees paid by all the users to the troll) to be higher than the fee paid by the troll to the copyright holder. Thus, it would seldom pay to be a troll; when the system works right, their total income equals the price they paid the copyright holder, plus they have the cost of finding the copyright owner in the first place on top of that.