Copyright – Orphan Works Reform

I’ve been a fan of Lawrance Lessig for a while. He is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. He is a large proponent of Copyright regulation, and was one of the founding members of the Creative Commons license. He has recently put together a great presentation for a proposal for how to handle “Orphan Works.” The video below does a better job of describing it than I will, but in a nutshell, The US Copyright Office has issued a report on the current issues of “Orphan Works,” (content that is still technically under copyright, but the copyright owner are either very difficult, or impossible to locate). This proposal is a great step in how to deal with them. It’s a little long, but definitely worth watching if you have any interest in this.

Lessig also hosts a few other video presentations on his site discussing similar topics.