- Next month is your parent’s 25th wedding anniversary and you want to make copies of one of their wedding photographs for their party, but the wedding photographer is nowhere to be found. What do you do?
- You are a photographer concerned that your copyrighted works are are constant risk of being used without compensation. How will orphan works legislation make copyright piracy less or more likely?
- You work for a major Hollywood motion picture studio and the studio wants to remake a 1960 movie, but you can’t find the writer of the script who owns the copyright to it. What do you and your film studio do?
- You are an actor in a movie and are due residuals for your work. The studio goes out of business in the future and someone wants to remake the movie. What part of the royalties that might be due under an orphan works system be claimed by you or your union?
- You are a local museum director and have a box of old negatives in your archives that appear to date from the 1950s. They depict the scenery of the town square in the 1950’s and you want to include them in a soon to be published book about the town's history. What do you do?
- Asian counterfeiters look for every excuse they can to legitimize the theft of your work. Does the legislation give them another excuse or does it make no difference to the existing piracy problem?
- You are a software company with a soon-to-expire fifteen year exclusive license for a key component of a software package you sell. The copyright owner cashed out his stock options and disappeared to live the good life after signing the license with you. What do you do when the license expires?
Group ranging from copyright owners such as publishers, motion picture studios, photographers, illustrators; copyright users such as historians and documentarians; archivists and librarians; U.S. government entities; and other groups have all expressed interest in the orphan works issue.