Orphan Works comment 0659

Comments to the Copyright Office on Orphan Works March 25, 2005 From Elizabeth Townsend, Ph.D., J.,D. I am responding to the Notice of Inquiry Concerning Orphan Works put out by the Copyright Office. I am a scholar with a Ph.D. in Modern European History, a J.D. from the University of Arizona, and am finishing a LL.M. in International Trade, also from the University of Arizona. I am currently a non-resident fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, and next year, I will be the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (in the law department, focused on copyright). I also have a blog, Academic Copyright [http://academiccopyright.typepad.com], which looks specifically at copyright issues affecting scholars, teachers, students, and others who both use copyrighted materials as well as create copyrighted works of their own, usually in an non-commercial setting. My interest in copyright came while working on my doctorate in European Intellectual and Cultural history at the University of California, Los Angeles. I work in the field of biography. It was the 1990s when court cases were restricting fair use in the biography setting, which I found as a scholar quite disturbing. I began researching what materials I could and could not expect to use (with and without permission). Then, in the classroom and in conducting oral histories, more copyright questions surfaced -- who owns what, what can one use and in ...