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Orphan Works Bill: Support Your Local Artist!
On 23, May 2008 | No Comments | In Design Life | By Lorraine
I had intended my next post to be somewhat more fun in nature, but decided to put it on hold when I saw what Megan Frau posted yesterday on her blog. I first heard about the Orphan Works Bill when our former printmaking professor forwarded an email to us explaining that Congress is currently trying to pass it. This excerpt from the email can explain the issue better than I can:
The US Congress is proposing legislation that would “orphan” all your copyrighted art works, unless you register each and every work you produce in future and have produced in the past with an outside agency! Otherwise people could use your images without payment or permission, since it will be considered “orphaned” and will have no copyright protection.
It’s a terrible piece of legislation! [....] Right now, under the Berne Convention, an artist has a right to copyright as soon as a work is completed. He or she has to do nothing to “register” it as copyright. It’s automatically protected by copyright. Now our Congress is proposing to overturn that International treaty (yes, another one!) by it’s proposed actions.
Under the proposed legislation, you would have to digitize all your existing works and all future works, and pay a fee for each work to an outside registry to protect its copyright. This is appalling. And also would be unaffordable for most artists, as well as often logistically impossible. I personally have hundreds of existing works “out there”, and many photographers I know have even more.
—Kevin via studioNOTES
Aside from forwarding the onto people I thought might be interested, I kept meaning to email my congressman. Megan’s links to Illustrator Partnership’s Legislative Action Center prompted me to do it this morning. I’ll link you to their LAC home as it has a lot of really great information and resources for artists about the issue. The first 2 links on the page are the ones I used to email my congressmen, and it literally took me 15 minutes to do. Further, I noticed that the deviantART community has a petition going online.
If anyone has any other links that are helpful regarding the issue, please feel free to add them as a comment below.
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Wow. That is insane. What is the government’s motivation for changing this? It seems completely illogical.
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Supposedly, it was proposed to allow works that have fallen into the public domain to be used by museums and libraries. But I admit that I’ve had a hard time trying to find any information on the web in support of the proposed bill. As far as I was able to research, it mainly benefits museums and the like as intended, but also corporations who have much to gain by theft of photography and image rights. If anyone out there is able to find more information, feel free to share.
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