RFC Deadline Looms For "Orphan Works" copy

psychonaut writes "As previously reported on Slashdot, the US Copyright Office is currently reviewing the law as it applies to "orphan works" and "abandonware". The question is how to treat works (books, films, software, etc.) for which the copyright owner cannot be found so that permission can be granted to republish or create derivative works. "The issue is whether orphan works are being needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination inhibited. If no one claims the copyright in a work," they write, "it appears likely that the public benefit of having access to the work would outweigh whatever copyright interest there might be." The Copyright Office has been soliciting comments from the public since 26 January 2005. Now, as their 25 March deadline draws nearer, the EFF, along with freeculture.org and Public Knowledge, have teamed up to produce a website,Orphan Works, which gives some background on the issue and makes it easy to submit comments directly to the Copyright Office." And while you're at, contribute to the EFF. Good organization.

Comments

Again, that's not the case

[Moraelin]

The _only_ people publishing stuff purely for recognition seem to be newbie programmers.

Everyone else is paid for it, even if their work is then included in an OSS project. E.g., OpenOffice is paid for by Sun. So is NetBeans. E.g., Eclipse is mostly IBM's work. E.g., as I've said, check some of the submissions in your average Linux distro. Check out how many of them are paid employees of IBM, Novell, Sun, RedHat, etc.

But let's get back to the actual ones that publish stuff actually written 100% unpaid for, and 100% for recognition. The problem is that invariably they're (1) _only_ the programmers, (2) never polish their work to any degree of usability, and (3) newbies.

1. E.g., one problem most OSS software projects have is the utter lack of usability specialists, good graphics artists, technical writers, etc. Sure, you might find some newbie CS student publishing his newest Pac-Man clone for peer-recognition. You almost _never_ however find also some graphics artist involved to make the graphics, nor someone who could write a good manual, nor more than 1-2 simple levels for their games because good level designers never joined. (E.g., try Pingus someday. Great game engine, but it never got more than the tutorial levels.)

And that also means that other domains would be practically non-existant, because they're not software hacks. E.g., good luck finding someone who'll come over and take professional photos at your wedding, just for fame and recognition. E.g., while every teen dreams of being a famous novelist, I can't remember any good novels that were just posted on the Internet for fame and recognition. E.g., good luck waiting for a good movie to be made purely for fame and recognition: those cost quite a bit to make, even if you don't go for overpaid stars, so everyone will want to recoup their investment one way or another.

2. An invariable problem of projects made purely for fame and recognition, is the lack of polish. And I mean above and beyond the fact that they couldn't find a usability expert that wants to work for free.

See, everyone wants to code great hacks or great algorithms for fame and recognition. "W00t, my clever BitFlipSort works 3 times faster" or "W00t, my clever use of B-trees makes the whole search faster" are things you can (A) brag about, and (B) get done in an afternoon. On the other hand, "I spent 2 months making a good usable GUI for it, and another month writing a good manual" is neither. It's just plain old work and no bragging rights. Not many will do it.

3. They're invariably newbies, and the results are invariably of very limited scope, complexity and quality. Sad to say, I haven't found any professional project that was made purely for fame and glory.

To put it otherwise, yeah, writing a monolythic 0.01 kernel is something a bored hacker might do just for fame and recognition. Turning it into an enterprise multi-platform OS, on the other hand, that involved a helluva lot of paid people.

But even that 0.01 kernel is already something _way_ over the level of usual works made purely for fame and glory. Most of them are barely at the level of "hey, look, I too made a buggy Windows or X calculator."

So to cut an already long story short, I really wouldn't fancy a future where everyone is done just for recognition. I very much prefer being able to go to the shop and buy a good program, than wait for a bored hacker to make a piss-poor approximation of it in his free time.