The Copybites Copyright Law Blog has coverage of the Copyright Office’s new proposal regarding orphan works. I’m not a lawyer, but at a glance, this looks like a big improvement.
Orphan works are copyrighted (or at least not clearly public domain) works whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate. As such, these works are impossible to license for use by others, for use in derivative works, and so on.
The report is available from the Copyright Office, and an RSS feed to monitor progress is at the bottom of the page.
BTW: really cool use of RSS…