[Foundation-l] Comment on Copyright Orphans

Tue Apr 12 14:35:49 UTC 2005

We should be making an official comment on the issue of copyright orphans
now before the U.S. Copyright Office. The deadline is May 9.

>From http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/:

The Copyright Office seeks to examine the issues raised by ³orphan works,²
i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to
locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership
of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from
incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works
available to the public. The Office is now seeking written comments from all
interested parties. Specifically, the Office is interested in whether there
are compelling concerns raised by orphan works that merit a legislative,
regulatory or other solution, and what type of solution could effectively
address these concerns without conflicting with the legitimate interests of
authors and right holders.

See this story: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67139,00.html for
details.

Procedure for sending comment:

Send to orphanworks at loc.gov a message containing the name of the person
making the submission, his or her title and organization (if the submission
is on behalf of an organization), mailing address, telephone number, telefax
number (if any) and e-mail address. The message should also identify the
document clearly as either a comment or reply comment. The document itself
must be sent as a MIME attachment, and must be in a single file in either:
(1) Adobe Portable Document File (PDF) format (preferred); (2) Microsoft
Word 2000 or earlier; (3) WordPerfect 8.0 or earlier; (4) Rich Text File
(RTF) format; or (5) ASCII text file format.

This is clearly something the Wikimedia Foundation should officially weigh
in on.