[SCC_Active_Members] Heads Up - Copyright Law and Orphan Works

[Paul McJones]

For the purposes of preservation and historical/educational use, would 
it be necessary to ask that these "orphaned" works pass into the public 
domain?  Perhaps there is a less final status that would suffice for us, 
such as saying that it would become legal to copy for purposes of 
preservation, etc.  If the original copyright holder later spoke up 
(before the copyright term expired), he/she could still try to go after 
commercial users.

I'm not sure if my idea makes legal sense, but the idea is to ask for as 
little as possible...


Paul


Sellam Ismail wrote:
>>I ran across a pointer to a request from Senate Judicary 
>>Committee that the Library of Congress study impact of 
>>orphaned works WRT to current copyright law. It appears 
>>relevent to the SCC mission. Two questions, 1) how can this 
>>affect us in acheiving our goals, and 2) should the Museum 
>>comment on this issue WRT to software? OK three questions. 
>>Also what changes would we like to see that would facilitate 
>>the preservation and study of historic software?
> 
> 
> I'm not sure if the committee presiding over this had software in mind,
> but we should certainly draft some sort of formal response explaining
> our position.  What is our position?  I believe it should be that
> software for which there is no longer an apparent copyright holder
> should be released into the public domain.  This is all the more
> pressing since as we all know the bits are fading and if they don't make
> exceptions for older copy protected software from the DMCA then we might
> lose large bodies of software for good.
> 
> I'm not inclined to let the DMCA get in the way of preserving old
> software (notwithstanding the fact that it's such a bad law to begin
> with), but by raising these issues we may well achieve an impact beyond
> the immediate concerns of the possibility of losing old software.
>