The following post appeared yesterday in the Public Policy Connections blog of the Special Libraries  Association (SLA).

 ”After passing in the Senate on 26 September, the Orphan Works bill, which limits remedies in copyright infringement cases involving orphan works, died in the House on 3 October after Congress voted on the financial rescue bill and ajourned.In June 2008, The Library Copyright Alliance, of which SLA is a member, wrote a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) expressing appreciation for their continued leadership on the bill. The letter proposed amendments to orphan works legislation.”

The blog post is self-explanatory and linked, at least for the time being, to all pertinent events, documents, and commentary, including the full-text of the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 that had passed the Senate in September. The SLA blog post also includes links to a CBS news article about the approval of the financial rescue bill. The brief CBS News article puts the process of keeping the orphan works issue in perspective. Like so many other issues that are central to our academic work and policy concerns, orphan works have been pushed off the radar screen by the present economic collapse.

Nevertheless, Gigi Sohn at Public Knowledge remains confident that orphan works–like the Mets–will return to Congressional attention as a policy issue. Sohn noted that it was not just that the bill was eclipsed by economic concerns but that there are substantive issues yet to be worked out.

We should stay tuned to this ongoing debate and watch some of the key players recognize the changing environment in which they create and alter their positions.

The text of several volumes of this series from the Bodleian and Harvard Libraries are now available online. Er…were available. Before Spring Break, an incomplete run of 23 volumes from the years between 1856 and 1908 were available in Full View. Don’t ask me what happened to these texts; maybe I just dreamt of them.

You can imagine the difficulties dealing with a series that has six formal titles. As listed in OCLC Worldcat, this series has been cataloged as “Collecção das leis do Brazil; 1808-21; Collecção das leis do Imperio do Brazil; 1822-Nov. 14, 1889; Decretos do governo provisorio da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brazil; Nov. 15, 1889-Feb. 13, 1891; Collecção das leis da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brazil; (varies slightly); Feb. 14, 1891-19.”

Nevertheless, in whatever manner these sets are cataloged, every one of the volumes is in the public domain. Under Law 9.610 of February 19, 1998, the most recent Brazilian legislation that fully addresses author rights, the texts of treaties, laws, decrees, regulations, judicial decisions and official enactments are EXEMPT from copyright.

The University of Texas owns a complete set of the annual publications dating back to 1808. The series consists of more than 580 volumes that now grace 75 linear feet of shelves in the Benson. Only twenty-three other libraries, most of them in research institutions, listed some of the same titles among their holdings. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all these texts available online? All the titles in the Benson Latin American Collection were sent out for digitization last October (2007) but have not year appeared on Google Book Search. Maybe it is just a matter of time until Google can sort out the complicated bibliographic information for this set of books and put them all on line. Be patient.

Do stay alert to the titles opening up on Google Book Search. Meanwhile, take a look at the Central Library of the Tribunal de Justicia do Estado da Bahia That library maintains an online database of the series but the listing does not yield full-text. Other websites also provide bits and pieces of this colossal set. An interesting group, Causa Imperial, which promotes the restoration of a Brazilian Empire, provides access to the indices for the 1831-1840 series.

Lawyers interested in current issues have other sources. For English-speaking researchers interested in Brazilian law, take a look at the Legal Research Guide for Brazil provided by the Library of Congress.