Meryl's Notes Blog

The Copyright Office has posted a notice of proposed rulemaking on August 4 (Federal register and signed on August 1) with comments due by August 22 and reply comments due no later than September 7. Not a big deal, right?

Reading and translating it from government-speak to English, the customer-focused office gives you not one, but TWO ways to deliver comments on the proposal: by hand and by mail. Wait. Even the mail options are limited. No overnight courier services allowed! A fax number appears, but it’s for contacting the office, not for paper submissions. After all, how do you deliver the original copy in fax and how long would it take to fax five copies?

More details from the Web Standards Project on how this has an impact on browsers. When I originally read the document — there was no mention of browsers. The copyright office is working to implement an electronic preregistration system. and it will initially only support Internet Explorer 5.1 and higher. This is the first step backwards I’ve seen with browsers in ages. Does this office not know anything about much attention Mozilla took away from IE?

The office is encouraging lots of submissions with these excellent submission rules. What have we learned today, class? [ Link: Esther. ]