SF Bay Guardian article about orphan works roundtable
The San Francisco Bay Guardian has an article about last month's FCC roundtable on orphan works at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School. And the hero of the piece is the head of photo services for Wal-Mart:
Specifically, [Joe] Lisuzzo and Wal-Mart are pushing the government to change the way it deals with "orphan works," which are described by the US Copyright Office as "copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate." Orphan works can be literally anything from an old film clip to a line of computer code to a haiku scribbled on the back of a napkin. As the law stands, anyone who wants to reproduce an orphan work or tweak it into some novel creation (à la sound collagists Negativland) has to hunt down the copyright holder for permission or risk getting sued.At the Aug. 2 hearing, held in a conference room at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, Lisuzzo encouraged the feds to make it easier for folks to use orphan works. Talk about strange bedfellows: In this particular battle Wal-Mart is on the same side as librarians, intellectuals, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an activist group that spends much of its time wrangling with big corporations.
There's no way to gauge how many works have been orphaned, but there's definitely a decent number of people who'd like to use them: About 700 people contacted the US Copyright Office in February and March to ask for revised regulations on orphan works, and you can get a sense of the headaches they're having by checking out the public comments posted on the Copyright Office's Web site (www.copyright.gov/orphan).