Ray Saintonge wrote:
I agree with Anthere that we perhaps should submit
something
representing WMF, but it's hard to know what kind of official position
we should take In my own submission I certainly could not go so far
as to state that I was representing the Foundation. They were
entirely my own opinions. What points should we be makeing?
I was thinking about this a bit, and I'm not that sure it strongly
impacts us, especially in a way that's easy to convincingly explain.
The major thing Wikimedia is known for is Wikipedia, which really is
unlike most of what's been written in the past, whether in or out of
copyright. Sure, we imported en masse some 1911 EB articles, but even
if all copyright disappeared entirely, the current revision of EB would
need substantial work to be turned into good Wikipedia articles. I'm
not sure it would buy us that much over just getting some more writers.
And with images, we can either generally take images ourselves
(something that's happening increasingly often), or rely on fair use for
historically important images that are still under copyright. There are
a few cases where asking for permission would be helpful, but in general
an orphaned work is no worse from our perspective than a work that's
non-orphaned but where a copyright holder simply refuses to grant us a
GFDL or CC license to it. Wikisource probably suffers the most direct
impact, but again, orphaned works aren't a unique problem---copyrighted
but non-orphaned works are no better.
I get the impression that the case the copyright office is most
interested in is one that doesn't impact us at all: The case where
someone is willing to pay a copyright holder for a license to use their
work (e.g. for a film adaptation of a book), but cannot do so because
the copyright holder is unable to be located.
-Mark