Orphaning is a way to remove some or all of your works from your account without taking them away from fandom. We hope you’ll use the orphan_account to allow your works to remain in the Archive even if you no longer wish to be associated with them, or have them connected to your account.

An orphan work is a copyrighted work whose owner is impossible to identify or contact. This inability to request permission from the copyright owner often means orphan works cannot be used in new works nor digitized, except when fair use exceptions apply.

While there are no studies in the U.S. to state how many orphan works currently exist, it is estimated that as many as half of Hathitrust Digital Library’s works, over 10 million works, are orphan works.

Orphan works are copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or impossible to identify and/or locate. Orphan works are perceived to be inaccessible because of the risk of infringement liability that a user might incur if and when a copyright owner subsequently appears.

“Orphan Works” probably comprise the majority of the record of 20th century culture. These works are still presumably under copyright (only works published before 1923 are conclusively in the public domain), but the copyright owner cannot be found.

Widow: A widow occurs when the last line of a paragraph is not able to fit at the bottom of a page or column. Instead, it sits at the top of the next page, looking out of place.

Orphan works are creative works or performances that are subject to copyright – like a diary, photograph, film or piece of music – for which one or more of the right holders is either unknown or cannot be found.

The work will no longer link to the creator’s AO3 account and the creator will no longer be able to modify the work in any way. The act of orphaning a work cannot be undone. AO3 does not indicate what date a work was orphaned, and still shows the original publication date.

You can restrict access to a work so that only logged-in Archive users can access it. To do this, go to the Edit Work page (refer to How do I edit a work?). In the Privacy section, select the option “Only show your work to registered users” and then select the “Update” button.

In typography, you want to avoid single words as the last line of a paragraph and single lines of text at the beginning or end of a column or page. A lonely single word at the end of a paragraph creates a visual interruption in the flow that breaks the reader’s focus. This is called a “runt”.

Widows and orphans are typographical terms for when a word is left on its own line at the start or end of a paragraph. They are considered poor typography. There are lots of reasons why they’re called bad typography: they look untidy; they suddenly end a paragraph; they leave a lot of white space between paragraphs.

An orphaned work remains in the Archive attached to the orphan_account, and cannot be edited or deleted.