The news we’ve been waiting to spring: On Tuesday morning, FreeCulture.org became FreeCulture.org, Inc., a non-profit corporation registered in Florida. (Seeing is believing.)

This provides us with an actual legal identity: now “FreeCulture.org” can accept your donations rather than one of us; “FreeCulture.org” can have a bank account; “FreeCulture.org” can have a P.O. Box, and so forth. It also provides a certain degree of personal indemnity for the people involved (though we admit, we don’t quite understand the totality of this yet). Probably most importantly, it’s the first step toward being a certified tax-exempt charity in the U.S. More on this later.

The initial members on our board of directors are Nelson Pavlosky of the Swarthmore group, Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock from Fraklin & Marshall, and myself (from the University of Florida).

Read on for more info on why things happened the way they did, what our next steps are, and how you can help…

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I updated the WordPress code to version 1.5.1. If anyone sees an issue, let me know.

Just a quick reminder that reply comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the subject of orphan works are due on May 9. Comments can be submitted using the form on OrphanWorks.org. These would be direct responses to the comments previously filed, which can be found on the Copyright Office’s Web site here.

We’ve written about orphan works previously ([1] [2] [3]); here’s a direct link to FreeCulture.org’s comment. Also, here are the requisite links to Copyfight and Boing Boing writing about the same thing.

After the reply comment period ends, the Copyright Office plans to hold hearings on the subject, and issue a report before the end of the year, according to Public Knowledge’s Alex Curtis. Let’s keep this in the public eye, and let our elected officials and bureaucrats know we want a solution.

It’s that time of year again: students across the U.S. are preparing to go home for the summer, or already have. But FreeCulture.org will remain active — see our last post for details. In addition, here’s what some Free Culture students are doing this summer:

• Elizabeth Stark of Harvard Law School will be interning with the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Fred Benenson of New York University will be interning with Creative Commons
• Nelson Pavlosky of Swarthmore College will be interning with Public Knowledge
• Eldo Varghese of the University of Florida will be interning with the Wikimedia Foundation
• I’ll be in Canada, where I plan to meet with Michael Geist and cc | ca project lead Marcus Bornfreund

Of course, many of our members will be working summer jobs, taking classes, traveling or studying abroad, lounging on the beach, barbecueing, etc. — which are all perfectly valid activites as well :)

Best of luck to those of you still in finals. Hope everyone has a good summer!