BookFinder.com Journal

Orphaned works in our neighborhood

Earlier this year, BookFinder.com submitted a comment about the problem of orphaned works to the US Copyright Office. Orphan works are copyrighted materials whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate, meaning they can no longer be purchased, reprinted, cited at length, or otherwise built upon.

I was trying to find the hours of a restaurant near BookFinder.com’s office, when I stumbled onto a submission from the restaurant’s web developer (PDF), telling the story of her failed attempts to contact the illustrator of an out-of-print book. The restaurant staff had apparently wanted to use a certain image from the book as part of their website design, but they weren’t able to contact the artist or publisher to get any kind of an answer.

It’s one thing to read submissions online, but the scope of the problem really hits home when even our local pasta shop is speaking out about copyright law reform.

Posted by Anirvan

BookFinder.com on orphan works

A wide variety of organizations weighed in to the the US Copyright Office with their comments on the problem of orphan works. BookFinder.com was one of them.

We take a broad view of what it means to help our users find books, be they new, used, rare, out of print, or available in another country. We studied the books that our users were searching for, and found significant interest in orphaned titles.

Most of the end-users calling for greater access wrote in either discuss specific cases, or making broad assertions. Our submission to the US Copyright Office offers up some hard numbers, underscoring the fact that orphan works affect large numbers of real world commercial users. We don't have a specific opinion about the best way to solve the problem, but we wanted to respond to copyright maximalists attempting to paint the issue as too small or anecote-driven to warrant action.

Interested? Read submissions defining the problem from BookFinder.com, Visual Resources Association, Vai Vecchio Press, George Mason University's Copyright Office, Presscommune, and the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Read submissions with ideas on addressing the problem from Creative Commons, Recording Industry Association of America, Google, Stanford University Libraries, the Association of American Publishers, and Microsoft.

You can also browse the complete list of comments.

[Now Reading: Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem]

Posted by Anirvan

Orphan work comments made public

We've been blogging about the problem of orphan works all month (1, 2).

(Again, orphan works are copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate, meaning they can no longer be purchased, reprinted, cited at length, or otherwise built upon. If BookFinder.com shut down and its employees/owners died without heirs, these blog posts would become orphaned, and there would be no legal way for someone to reprint them in an anthology.)

The US Copyright office has been asking the public for their comments about the problem, and for possible solutions.

The Copyright Office has now parsed through the responses, and has posted the 700+ public comments on its website. There's a wide array of respondents -- small publishers and researchers having problems reprint orphan works, companies in the copyright industries pushing against major reform, and a vast array of comments that don't easily fall into either category.

Take a look. There's a lot of interesting comments in the mix...

[Now Reading: Ask the Pilot by Patrick Smith]

Posted by Anirvan

Examples of orphan works

The folks over at FreeCulture.org have some of the comments to the US Copyright Office on the subject of orphan works available on their website.

Here's an example:

M. B. of VA writes: "Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, by Erwin Panofsky, is considered to be an important work on gothic architecture. The book is no longer in print, so cannot be purchased easily. The current copyright holder, if any, cannot be located. Searches were done in Books in Print and on the Internet to determine if the original publisher could be located. A University of Virginia class in medieval architecture has need of the work. If the book could be scanned and the text made searchable, the students would have the access they need, and the work would also be available for other scholarly pursuits."

Interested? You can read more public comments, learn about the issue, or submit your own stories.

[Now Reading: Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Jack Dann]

Posted by Anirvan

Rescuing "orphan works"

At BookFinder.com, we're concerned not just about the books you find, but also the ones you can't find. Please spread the word about orphan works.

Orphan works are materials (e.g. books) with copyright owners that are difficult or impossible to locate--making it impossible to buy, reprint, or build upon. Books can get "orphaned" for all sorts of reasons. Publishers shut down. Authors move, change their names, or pass away. Under American copyright law, academics, artists, researchers, and plain-old-readers have no recourse if the copyright holder can't be contacted.

After pressure from the public, the US Copyright Office has finally agreed to look at the problem of accessing works owned by missing copyright holders. Between now and March 25, the Copyright Office is asking the public for comments on their experience with orphan works, and suggestions on solutions to the problem.

Have you had trouble identifying or locating books whose copyright holders can't be found or contacted? Please submit your stories.

Why is the issue of orphan works important? Take an example. Say author John McTeeth had self-published an influential book of poems about dentistry in 1943. If in neither he nor his heirs can be identified in 2005, then:

• a scholar studying medicine and poetry couldn't attempt to get the rights to quote significantly from the original work in her thesis
• the American Dental Association couldn't ask to reprint the poems in an anthology on dental literature
• a publisher wouldn't have anyone to contact if it wanted to reissue the title
• fans of McTeeth's work would have absolutely no way to buy a new copy of the book

It's a bad situation all around. Countries like Canada have come up with workarounds that protect both the public interest in accessing the work and the copyright holders' right to compensation for their expression. The US should do the same.

[Now Reading: Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang]

Posted by Anirvan