BTW, your blog software seems broken. Regardless of whether I select “Remember Me” or not, I always need to fill out my data again. And when I use Preview, the word “human” is lost and needs to be retyped.

Comments do not have to be limited to the actual
examples of orphan works. I never encounter an
orphan work but that does not mean that it does
not exist (“absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence”) and that I can’t submit my comment.
Not all questions as posed in the Federal Register
are related to the actual examples of orphan works.
Some questions are related to laws and treaties
themselves.

After the reply period is over, I am sure that
the Copyright Office will analyze comments,
categorize them, and record them for future
reference. In light of that, it is important
to counter some comments made by totally
self-serving authors and artists who claim that
there is no such thing called orphan works and
that even if they exist, that’s too bad for the
public (“damn the public”).

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<[email protected]>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
comment in the public domain.

The three or four I read failed to point to any real-life examples of orphan works, which made it hard to put the proposals in a context. For instance, ASCAP says it cannot imagine orphaned musical performances. If that’s true, then why did they enter a comment?

Microsoft can imagine orphaned works, and provides a well thought out proposal of how to deal with orphaned works, but as other commenters fails to ground it in real-life examples, so that we are left guessing what these orphan works are.

(I did not read these comments whole, so I may have missed the examples I ask for.)

the ASCAP comment is typically for a self serving organizational “lets build a wall” point of view – I’m sure, ASCAP will gladly sell STM a licence for public performance of all these orphaned works, and in the fine print will disclaim ANY liabilities for their “100% 80 countries coverage”.

So, I’d be interested to see if using the xpdf / gsview method will allow access to the obscured personal information.

As I predicted, this easily extracts the email headers and other redacted information. Sloppy. Ah, well.

Now the email submissions (typically in courier) are searchable. One could in theory do copy and paste, but I believe the default is to disable that functionality. The person who did the work either didn’t know about the option, or didn’t care.

I’m guessing someone was told “Make all of these available online in the exact same format.” PDF is a reasonable compromise (not my favorite, but *eh*). The person doing the work chose the simplest, cheapest option. As a result: no cutting and pasting. I don’t fault them for it.

Interestingly, while loading one of the email message I discovered something interesting: the headers (From, To, Subject) briefly appeared, then disappeared. It appears that the “redacting” they mention rather naive: they just put a white block over it. However the text is still present in the file. Anyone with enough technical skill could easily extract the information. Sloppy. There have been cases where important Secret information was accidentally leaked this way.