The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is protesting a proposal by the U.S. Copyright Office that may temporarily require that online forms be submitted via the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. “The proposed system would be contrary to at least the spirit of federal information policy adopted by the E-Government Act of 2002,” said W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Weitzner,who is technology and society domain leader at W3C, in a letter to the office. The office’s proposal pertains to preregistration of copyright claims. Support for Netscape, Firefox and Mozilla is planned by the office but initial support may be limited to Internet Explorer, according to a statement from the Copyright Office. While stressing that W3C was not criticizing Internet Explorer, the W3C officials said the office would be placing limitations on users of Mac OS, Linux and Unix, who may have incompatible browsers. Cellphone and PDA users and persons with disabilities also may be impacted, Berners-Lee said.“From a practical perspective, the single-vendor restriction will deny preregistration benefits entirely to broad classes of creators of covered copyrighted works,” the W3c officials said.W3C also stressed that the Web “was born and achieved widespread use only because of a commitment to open, vendor-neutral standards.” The office’s deadline for comments is today, with reply comments due by September 7. Technology Industry