Here’s a way you can take a few minutes today to make copyright work better for artists, musicians, and academics:

Here’s a way you can take a few minutes today to make copyright work better for artists, musicians, and academics:

OrphanWorks.org

The Copyright Office is thinking of changing the rules to make it easier to reuse copyrighted works (photos, music, film footage, text, whatever) when the copyright holder is impossible to find. We’re not talking about sweeping reform here, but it could make copyright suck a lot less for a lot of people.

The situation right now is so sad: even when people totally want to play by the rules and ask / pay to use a piece of copyrighted stuff in their own work, they can’t even do it because copyright holders are hard to find. In other words, copyright is a failure even when you have the money to play by the rules.

Anyway, the Copyright Office looking for public comment, so let’s try to get them some public comment. We’ve heard the most helpful comments will be horror stories of trying to track down a copyright holder and it being impossible. To file a comment, and for more info, check out:

OrphanWorks.org