Copyright Office: Is only MS IE acceptable to you?

Found on NewsForge on Wednesday, 10 August 2005
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Would it bother you if the only browser you could use to preregister a copyright claim with the United States Copyright Office is Internet Explorer, version 5.1 and higher? Well, you might be getting bothered real soon, because that is what the Library of Congress has in mind.

In a followup to its July 22, 2005, Notice of Proprosed Rulemaking, the Copyright Office is now seeking "information as to whether persons filing the electronic-only preregistration form prescribed by the Copyright Office will experience difficulties if it is necessary to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser in order to preregister a work."

NewsForge tried to speak with David O. Carson, General Counsel for the Library of Congress Copyright Office, this morning. His name is given as the primary contact on the request for comments. Unfortunately, Carson is on vacation and is not available.

Next we tried Charlotte Douglass, Principal Legal Advisor, whose name is also provided as a contact point. Alas, she is out of the office until August 15th.

Our last effort was to speak with the author of the notice, Associate General Counsel Tanya Sandros. You guessed it. She is unavailable. It's not that the Library of Congress Copyright Office is closed for the summer, but the receptionist did tell us that everyone connected with situation is unavailable.

Wait, does that mean that the webmasters of the United States Copyright Office are too dumb to create a form which works in all browsers? I'm not even going to start ranting about people being unavailable.