Internal:Public Policy/Orphan works

This is a draft of the Public Policy Committee's report to the Board of Directors on the subject of Orphan Works and Mass Digitization for the U. S. Copyright Office workshop on March 10–11, 2014.

Outline

• Background
  • What are orphan works?
  • How Wikimedia projects have benefited from public domain works: media in Commons, text in Wikisource and Wikipedia, etc.
  • Wikimedia projects cannot currently use orphan works; how they would benefit from being able to use them to fulfill our educational mission.
• How are Wikimedia's needs different than the more well-known case of Google Books etc.?
• Which of the specific provisions being proposed would be best? Would some be too burdensome for use on Wikimedia projects?

Sources

• The workshop page
• A 2006 report on orphan works by the Copyright Office
• A 2011 background paper on mass digitization by the Copyright Office, especially see pp. 25ff