[Foundation-l] Re: Comment on Copyright Orphans

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. 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(a)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.