Pug’s Place

The Library of Congress’ Copyright Office issued a Request for Comment some time ago about what to do with so-called “orphaned” copyrighted works, things that are still protected under copyright, but their creator/custodian has been out of contact for an absurd amount of time (FreeCulture.org of course wants those works brought back into the public domain). Nobody on the Internet has made it easy to submit a comment to the Copyright Office yet, so Gavin Baker asked me to write a web-form to make it easy. There were some problems with this:

1. The CO’s requirements said that comments must be submitted as attachments. So I had to find and integrate (read, debug…) a MIME-capable PHP email routine.
2. As Prof. Lessig said, “this could be a real source of irritation to the copyright office if people abuse it.” So thus I implemented an email verification step, which meant I added a database layer to the script, and the script became an application.
3. It’s also supposed to get the word out about Free Culture, so I added the ability to sign up for our primary mailing lists straight from the form. *THIS* meant I had to find a function to perform HTTP POST operations from within PHP, or in other words access a website and fill out a form automatically for the user. That took a few minutes, but now this voodoo is with the scri– application now too.

A couple hundred other little things went into it, too (okay, maybe a couple tens of other little things ). But now it’s online. It is not, however, very informative. That’s not my responsibility, thank goodness.

Amazingly, Prof. Lessig typed out my name in a conversation with Gavin (the one which contained the above quote). I feel touched and amazed. Maybe I’m just easily amazed, but it’s not every day that someone with Prof. Lessig’s notoriety refers to you.