How we're going to get f*cked
Well, not EVERYONE, exactly...just those of us who intend to make our living through our creativity.
There's a Bill sneaking its way through the government, called the "Orphan Works Bill," and it's absolutely worthy of Germany ca. 1935 (which, if you think about it, wasn't ALL that different than America ca. 2008). I'm parroting the email I received from my local writers' organization.
There's a reason why Google, Getty, Disney, et al are interested in seeing this bill pass:
http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=CqBZd0cP5Yc
PASS IT ON
The Orphan Works Bill promotes theft of creative work, pure and simple. This bill, currently under consideration in Congress, will deny you the right of immediate ownership over the product of your own creativity, and therefore makes it increasingly difficult to make money--much less a living--from it.
Copyright law, as it is now, acknowledges that the work you create is legally yours--your own property--as soon as you create it.
The Orphaned Works Bill will deny that right of ownership. It requires that the creator of any work must pay to register that work before it can be legally deemed the property of the creator. It means you have to register with a private company to have it copyrighted. That means your work can be "orphaned" as soon as it's created, especially since such companies don't exist right now.
Should someone copy your work and leave off your name, it becomes "orphaned" especially when the copied work is copied again and again. These days, this happens all too easily. That repeated copying makes it difficult to discover who created the work in the first place--even for the "diligent" copier.
In addition, it pits million- and billion-dollar companies that want easy access to creative work against artists who can hardly make ends meet from their own work as it is. Why? Because it puts the burden of proof on the creator of the work, rather than the copier.
Worse, it seriously erodes the property rights of citizens of the U.S. as outlined in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution.
Write your senator and congressperson now. Find your state representative: https://forms. house.gov/ wyr/welcome. shtml Feel free to forward this e-mail.
"The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave."
- George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1921.
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E: I read this, got agitated…
E:
I read this, got agitated, and then went looking about. There's a lot of stuff that's been written on the subject, the most prominent of which, to me, contains the exhortation that
However, I've not been able to find support for the assertion that the only solution available to artists and other creators is the use of some private registration agent that doesn't yet exist.
A copyright, presently, is automatic. A more easily defensible copyright can be gained by a filing with the Library of Congress, and is reasonably cheap and effortless. It's not free, as I recall, so it's also not as good as the de facto copyright already conferred by present law.
The trick here, and this is purely a matter of interpretation, is in the definition of "orphaned". Someone claiming an item is orphaned won't be enough to make it so. And someone copying a work, and then that copy being copied, also won't turn a work into an orphan.
At least not based on anything I've found and read in the last half hour.
It appears as though the prime beneficiaries of the law won't be MSFT and GOOG, but instead film makers, who are alleged to worry about using items that appear to be in the public domain, for fear of owing crippling and arbitrary retroactive royalties. Under the proposed law, they'd still be liable for royalties, but at a "Gee, I didn't know that!" rate. And proving they didn't know it will require them to show a decent amount of diligence in the effort. That effort, at a minimum, would include a web search to find the owner, and as a result, the existence of a simple dated web page claiming ownership with contact information for the owner would void any claim that a given work was orphaned.
Or so it seems to me.
So, while vigilance is required, I wonder if this is as bad as I'd first thought. Can you point me toward any sources that would disabuse me of the notions I've arrived at during my brief fling at understanding the issue?