If you plan to submit a comment on the orphan works problem to the U.S. Copyright Office before the March 25 deadline, the easiest way is to use the new web form launched by Free Culture, the EFF, and Public Knowledge. The site sponsors will make sure your comment is properly formatted (non-trivial) before passing it on to the Copyright Office. From the site: 'For designers, academics, artists, musicians, and filmmakers, using copyrighted works can be a huge headache. It can be impossible to find out if a particular work is still under copyright or not. And even when people would happily pay to use a copyrighted photo, passage, or video clip, it's often impossible (or extremely costly) to find the copyright holder. When this happens, everybody loses. Artists can't realize their creative vision, academics can't clearly communicate their ideas, and copyright holders don't get paid. Even worse, important pieces of our culture get needlessly locked away. Right now, the US Copyright Office is asking for public comment on the "orphan works" problem, so now's our chance to make the system work better....Orphan works are -- broadly speaking -- any copyrighted works where the rights-holder is hard to find. Because the cost of finding the owner is so high, creators can't build on orphan works, even when they'd be willing to pay to use them. In many cases the works were abandoned because they no longer produced any income. In most cases, rights holders, once found, are delighted to have their work used.' For more details, see the Public Knowledge page on orphan works.
(PS: If we had a good solution to the orphan works problem, then more works would be legally eligible for OA. It's that simple. A good solution would make it easier (1) to find rights holders for the purpose of requesting permission, (2) to use work without permission when the rights holder could not be found after a reasonable effort, and (3) to move works from the domain of copyright protection into the public domain when the rights holder no longer cared to enforce his/her rights. Please submit a comment to the Copyright Office and do what you can to ensure that we get such a good solution in the U.S.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/01/2005 05:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
