FOR INTERNATIONAL PHOTOJOURNALISTS: Copyright Action Letter

In case you know who to contact directly about this…

There’s a small grammatical error in the international letter, near the end “This is an attack on the principal of art itself” – should read “principle”, not “principal”.

and thank you Gayle… I hope you’re receiving all the ‘go gals!’ you need… what a marathon you’re fighting with this OW Bill.

Jenny

Yes, I am getting a lot of “go gals,” and have been giving some out myself. (:

At first glance a Photographer or Photojournalist may think, “Well what does tis have to do with me?” and tend to write off the AMI as far as commonality goes, however, the AMI along with IPA are spearheading opposition to this OW Bill 2008, due to specifically the havoc that would be spread in the Medical community as well as ours.

Just think, if anyone were allowed legally to orphan, alter and make derivatives out of accurate medical illustrations….well, it will mean the “dumbing down” of the highly respected and necessary field of medical illustration….and that, besides our own individual copyrights, will effect all of our health care (or lack of it as the case may be):

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For Immediate Release

May 7, 2008

Contacts: Mark Lefkowitz, M.A., CMI Cynthia Turner, M.A., CMI AMI President-Elect (850)231-4112/(850) 585-0193 (781) 784-5293/(781) 801-5458

Richard Gersony, M.F.A, CMI            William B. Westwood, M.S., CMI
(859) 494-7654/(859)225-6400            (518) 432-5237/(518) 618-8273

Congress Moves Quickly to Weaken 1976 Copyright Law
Bill Strips Artists of Essential Copyright Protections

Legislation to limit artists’ ability to protect their work from copyright infringement is being fast-tracked through both houses of Congress, and may be brought to the floor for a vote as early as this month. Passage of a similar measure was dashed in 2006 after opposition by visual artist organizations.

H.R. 5889, The Orphan Works Act of 2008/S. 2913, The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 will allow anyone to use, alter or publish an artist’s work for any reason without permission or payment if that work is designated an ‘orphan.’ A work of art could be designated an orphan work by anybody if its creator/copyright owner could not be located . The measure before Congress makes it easier to declare works ‘orphans.’ An individual has free reign to use or alter a piece of visual art if they have performed a ‘reasonably diligent’ search and are unable to locate an artist or copyright. No parameters are offered in the bill to determine what would comprise a “reasonably diligent” search.

The Orphan Works Act severely threatens the commerce of independent medical and scientific visual artists. “This bill jeopardizes the very core of a medical illustrator’s ability to make a living. Licensing permission accounts for a substantial portion of any artist’s income,” says Marcia Hartsock, owner of the Medical Art Company in Cincinnati, OH. “Now, if someone comes along and does a perfunctory search and doesn’t find my work in these image registries, they can use it—for legitimate or illegitimate uses—without my permission and without cost to them.”

One of the most objectionable provisions in the legislation allows non-profits to be exempt from even “reasonable compensation” if they infringe an artist’s work by declaring it an “orphan”. Non-profits account for the majority clientele for many medical illustrators, and these medical research foundations are some of the wealthiest in the world. “It would especially hurt medical illustrators who would lose much of their client base – non-profit hospitals, universities and research foundations – because of the easy availability of large numbers of orphaned images,” says Bill Matthews of Lifehouse Productions in Manchester, CT.

Rick Gersony, President of Medmovie in Lexington, KY contends that, “If these medical art businesses were caused to fail, non-profit organizations would lose a valuable, highly trained group of individuals, whose innovative, educational work supports their missions.

Why would Congress remove our copyright protection, breach our licenses and hinder the growth of this emerging digital US intellectual property sector?”

Medical illustrators are highly-educated professionals and their visual art educates medical and allied health professionals, as well as the general public. Their work also supports medical research for the advancement of science by commissions from nonprofit medical research foundations. Medical illustrations appear in medical textbooks, medical ads, professional journals, videotapes and films, computer-assisted learning programs, exhibits, lecture presentations, courtrooms, general magazines and programs for TV.

Registering Artwork to Avoid Orphan Status is Cost-Prohibitive and Untested
The bill has a disproportionate impact on visual artists because it is common for an artist’s work to be published without credit lines. This is especially true of art published in the Internet Age. The most common scenario of orphaning in visual art is the unmarked image. There would be only one way to identify the artist belonging to an unmarked image and that would be to match the art against an image-recognition database where the art resides with intact authorship information. Such technology is untested and such databases do not currently exist. The Copyright Office has proposed and the legislation has enshrined the creation of visual art registries and has stated explicitly that failure of an artist to meet this bureaucratic burden would result in his work automatically becoming an “orphan” and subject to legal infringement.

The cost of digitizing and registering their artwork will far outstrip the time or financial resources of most visual artists. Their inability to financially comply with the registries will result in vast numbers of visual works being exposed to legalized infringement. “This is an irresponsible and coerced forfeiture of reproduction rights protections guaranteed to creators by the Constitution of the United States. It is going to affect the incomes and intellectual property rights of every illustrator, fine artist, graphic artist and photographer in the world,” states Bill Westwood, a medical illustrator in Albany, NY.

Non-profits, publishers and other art licensees will be less likely to commission new work from artists if they can surf the net for free images that have become separated from identifying information. Medical illustrators’ pre-existing paintings and drawings – orphaned and re-published in some transformative manner, will see infringing opportunists co-opt their self-created intellectual property.

The passage of this bill would deprive medical illustrators of their exclusive right of creative control and ownership of their work. Under this law, an illustrator would be powerless to stop the unauthorized uses of his art, even in cases where the illustrator would never want or permit those uses. Infringements sanctioned under this Act will also breach existing exclusive use contracts already in force between illustrators and their clients because many illustrators work under non-disclosure agreements and exclusive licensing arrangements. “It boggles the mind that this is under consideration. Where is the economic impact study, or even any due diligence, to determine the harm and chaos this legislation will cause in the medical field? This will severely undermine medical illustrators’ ability to meet the needs of our clients, protect their interests, and protect our works,” says Cynthia Turner of Alexander & Turner Medical Illustration Studio.

The Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) is an international organization founded in 1945. Its members can be found in all centers of biomedical research and translate the complexities of scientific thought in innovative visual ways. There are approximately 1,200 practicing medical illustrators in the U.S.

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Together, we need to fight this hard and we need to it fight now!

I will have more updates, Press Releases today and soon. I’ve been emailing Press Releases all night and day long.

Please, US Photographers write your Congress people at:

TAKE ACTION!

Letter For U.S. Photojournalists to send to Congress

....and for our International Friends and Colleagues:

TAKE ACTION!

Letter for our International Friends and Colleagues

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Here are some new links to OW opposition articles compliments of NUJ Photo Head and LS member, Pete Jenkins, and especially for our international friends:

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/news/Photographers_urge_action_over_Orphan_Works_copyright_legislation_news_255955.html

http://copyrightaction.com/node

http://www.epuk.org/Opinion/848/uncle-sams-thieves-charter

...so I added your name now.

Anyway, yes! This is the same petition that Jon Anderson, Sion Touhig and I started way back in 2006. Our petition was successful in helping to halt the OW Bill back in 2006. However, OW was threatening to raise it’s ugly OW head again and again at anytime, so I continued to collect signatures and have been turning the signatures over to IPA and the Imagery Alliance a few at a time over the last two years.

So the same bill is back again since we weren’t able to kill it the first time back in 2006.

Thanks again for your signature, Hernan, and the bump!

Gayle

PLEASE HELP OUT BY TRANSLATING THE LETTER from INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND PHOTOJOURNALISTS INTO A LANGUAGE THAT YOU SPEAK TO MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO YOUR COMMUNITY.

HERE’S MY CONTRIBUTION IN SPANISH TO GET THE WORD OUT. OJALA Y LES SIRVA. AGREGUE UN ULTIMO PARRAFO, I ADDED AN EXTRA SENTENCE.

TODO LO MEJOR,

DAVID

Para: Artistas visuales no estadounidenses y para nuestros amigos y colegas internacionales

Sigue una carta muestra que pueden editar para personalizar

Se recomienda que envíen copias a las cuatro agencias estadounidenses que vienen a continuación. Se recomienda enviar por fax, ya que cartas tardan de 2 a 3 semanas por cuestiones de seguridad en Washington.

Asimismo, les animamos a que pidan intervención por parte de sus gobiernos. Favor de ayudar a difundir esta información a toda artista que ustedes conozcan. Gracias.

CARTA MUESTRA PARA ARTISTAS INTERNACIONALES

Estimado(a) ____

Me dirijo a Ud. para solicitarle se oponga a la legislación H.R. 5889 y S. 2913, conocida como Legislación de Obras Huérfanas, presentado ante el Congreso y Senado el 24 de abril, 2008. La propuesta actual enmendaría el Capítulo 5 de Título 17 del Código Estadounidense (Ley de Derechos de Autor) al agregar “514. Limitantes a los recursos legales en casos relacionados con obras huérfanas.” Este nuevo limitante sobre los recursos legales se impondrá a cualquier obra con derechos reservados donde sea que el usurpador pueda recurrir a una defensa de obras huérfanas, ya sea ésta legítima o no.

La legislación de Obras Huerfanas define una “obra huérfana” como cualquier obra que cuente con los derechos reservados, donde el usurpador dice que no ha podido localizar al autor(a) luego de realizar una búsqueda razonable. El usurpador mismo determinará si su esfuerzo ha sido “razonable” o no. El usurpador podría ignorar los derechos del autor y utilizar la obra para cualquier propósito, incluyendo usos comerciales. Este es una divergencia radical con las normas y leyes internacionales sobre derechos de autor ya existentes, así como de las prácticas comerciales actuales.

Estas propuestas tendrán un impacto fuera de proporción para la comunidad de artistas visuales porque es común que se publiquen imágenes sin créditos o porque es fácil que otros borren el crédito. Esto se ha vuelto mucho más común en la era de Internet. Ya que imágenes sin crédito no pueden ser referenciadas of fechadas, obras de artistas como yo, que vivo fuera de Estados Unidos, serán tan vulnerables a la piratería como las obras de artistas estadounidenses.

Ya que el arte visual es tan vulnerable a llegar a ser “huérfano”, solamente hay una manera para vincular una imagen sin crédito a su autor: depender de enormes bancos de datos de imagines. La Oficina de Derechos de Autor (Copyright Office) ha declarado que, si llegan a aprobarse estas propuestas, estos registros serán “indispensables” y han estipulado que tendrán que crearse a partir de la iniciativa privada y manejarse como empresas comerciales con fines de lucro.

Obligar a los artistas a depender de cualquier forma de registro con el fin de proteger su obra viola el Convenio de Berne para la protección de Obras Literarias y Artísticas. Esta ley prohibe que cualquier país miembro le imponga legislación a un dueño de derechos como condición de proteger su Derecho de Autor. Ver Berne. Artículo 5(2) “El gozo y ejercicio de estos derechos no se sujetará a cualquier formalidad.” Pero obligar a los artistas no estadounidenses a depender de registros comerciales para poder proteger su obra de la piratería, que una ley únicamente de los Estados Unidos legalizaría—, es profundamente preocupante.

Existen muchas razones por las que las normas internacionales prohíben el registro coercitivo. Antes de que puedan ser funcionales tales registros, los millones de millones de imágenes bajo protección de Derechos de Autor tendrían que capturarse junto con la información referente a la autoría. Esto significa que millones de imágenes del mundo entero que no se pueden vincular con la información de autoría, quedarán como “huerfanos”, aunque vivan los artistas y que estén trabajando y manejando sus derechos de autor. Esto valdría para imágenes registradas en bases de datos que, por algún error de cómputo, no logran vincularse con la metadata de la autoría.

No hay límite sobre el número de estos registros, ni los precios que cobrarían. El peso de pagar la digitalización y de depositar la copia digitalizada en el registro privado quedaría totalmente en manos del artista. La mayoría de los artistas han creado miles, o muchos miles de dibujos, fotos, grabados y pinturas, incluyendo obra édita e inédita. El costo de registrar todo esto queda fuera de las posibilidades de sus creadores. Sin embargo, la oficina de patentes ha declarado explícitamente que de no satisfacer este requisito burocráctico pesadillesco, su obra quedará, automáticamente sin madre ni padre, “huérfano”, y vulnerable, legalmente, a la piratería legalizada.

Se supone que la Oficina de Patentes y el Congreso de la Unión espera que un artista no estadounidense, como yo, registre toda su obra existente y la aun no existente con las hipotéticas bases de datos estadounidenses, si no quiero exponerme a la piratería comercial bajo la legislación de su país.

Estas propuestas crearán una incertidumbre masiva en los mercados donde se vende, se compra y se otorga licencia para obras visuales. Esto pasará porque eliminaría por completo la exclusividad de los derechos de autor de cualquier artista visual que pudiera vulnerar un pirata. Yo no tendría la capacidad de limitar los usos no autorizados de mi arte, aun en casos donde yo jamás permitiría ese tipo de uso. Además de ver mi obra utilizada de manera difamatoria y ofensiva, esto eliminaría cualquier contrato vigente entre mis clientes y yo. Esto es un ataque al principio mismo del arte, porque mi derecho exclusivo a resguardar los derechos de autor es la única herramienta a mi disposición para ejercer control creativo sobre mi trabajo y de proteger su valor en el mercado.

Estados Unidos es miembro del Acuerdo de Aspectos Relacionados con el Comercio de Propiedad Intelectual (TRIP). El Artículo 13 de este acuerdo relacionado con los derechos de autor admite algunas “excepciones y limitaciones” al derecho exclusivo de un artista a su derecho de autor. Se han codificado como una prueba de tres niveles:

“Países miembros confinarán las limitaciones y excepciones a los derechos exclusivos a:

1. ciertos casos especiales
2. que no tienen conflicto con la explotación normal de la obra y
3. no perjudiquen de manera irrazonable los intereses del dueño o dueña de sus derechos

Las iniciativas sobre Obras Huérfanas del 2008 han sido redactadas de una manera tan generalizada, que su aplicación no podría limitarse a obras que, de verdad, son huérfanas. De aprobarse estas iniciativas, estarán en violación de la Convención sobre Derechos de Autor de Berne y fallarán la prueba trifásica de TRIPs.

Cualquier solución a las Obras Huérfanas debería definir con precisión una obra huérfana como un derecho de autor ya no manejado por el dueño de los derechos, y debería limitarse estrictamente a usos de patrimonio cultural, para usos no comerciales y para uso de museos y bibliotecas para la conservación y la educación.

Cualquier intento de enajenar los derechos de autor a sus creadores o de obligarnos a pagar tarifas incosteables para proteger nuestros derechos, es un atentado en contra de la creación misma.

Atentamente,

Favor de enviar copias a:

Ambassador Susan C. Schwab
Office of the United States Trade Representative
600 17th Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20508
United States of America
FAX: 001 (202) 395-4549
(Telephone: (202) 395-3000)

Marybeth Peters
Register of Copyrights
U.S. Copyright Office
101 Independence Ave. S.E.
Washington, D.C. 20559-6000
United States of America
FAX: 001 (202) 707-8366
(Telephone: (202) 707-5959)

Jon W. Dudas
Director
United States Patent & Trademark Office
P.O. 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
United States of America
FAX: 001 (571) 273-8300
(Telephone: (800) 786-9199)

Reuben Jeffrey III
Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520
United States of America
FAX: 001 (202) 647-9763
(Telephone: (202) 647-7575)

The National Union of Journalists utterly rejects the idea for dealing with so-called “orphaned works” expressed in the “Shawn Bentley Orphan Works” Bill currently before the US Senate and the equivalent measure in the House of Representatives.

NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear says: “I urge all Senators and House members to oppose these Bills, because passing them would undermine the creativity that is so important to the economy of the United States and of its allies.”

The NUJ is determined that any arrangements for the use of articles, photos or illustrations – or indeed songs or dances – whose creators genuinely cannot be located must be based on these principles:

● The would-be user must apply for a licence to use the work in advance.
● Licences must only be granted where the would-be user shows that they have searched diligently for the author (a term which includes photographers and illustrators) – not just according to the customs of one country, but internationally.
● The would-be user must pay a fee that reflects the commercial value of the specific use – the “going rate” for a given work whether it be for use as the basis of a blockbuster film, in a newspaper or in a local library exhibition;
● When the parent of the “orphaned work” shows up, that fee must be handed over and a new fee must be negotiated.
● Fees that are not so distributed should be spent for the benefit of authors as a whole – on training, relief of hardship and cultural development.
● No law permitting use of works whose author cannot be identified must be passed until all authors, everywhere, have effective legal rights to be identified and to defend the integrity of their works – until authors worldwide have “inalienable moral rights” in the language of international law.

The key proposal in the Shawn Bentley Bill fulfils none of these criteria. It merely limits the legal liability of the user. It creates the perception of a free-for-all. This will encourage scams and rip-offs of authors, who will be left with no recourse unless they can raise many tens of thousands of dollars to fund pursuing abuses of their works through the civil courts. The Bill itself acknowledges this weakness when it calls for a review of remedies available to authors claiming relatively small sums.

Workable models that fulfil the above principles exist and the NUJ is working with its sibling unions to develop and adapt these and to promote systems to make it easier for would-be users to identify authors.

Jeremy Dear concludes: “NUJ members’ work is used all over the world, as is the work of US writers and photographers. They deserve – and they have in law – the right to fair pay for every use. We need international solutions, that respect international law.”

ENDS

Pete Jenkins
trading as DETAIL PHOTOGRAPHY
Photographic Consultant
23, Corby Road,
Mapperley,
Nottingham,
NG3 5HF
www.petejenkins.co.uk
www.photographerspro.eu/pete_jenkins/

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Pete Jenkins is head of NUJ Photo

Plese stay tuned as we are organizing a scheduled anti-OW March on Washington.

Hope he gets on board.

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Hello all:

More information coming soon on the Washington, DC, Senate and House of Representatives group(s) convening on Washington June 3-5th to lobby to oppose the Orphan Works bills.

The IPA, has asked us all to send postcards to our Senate and House district offices. Please forward this to as many people/lists/groups as you can.

Per Cynthia Turner and Brad Holland:

1. The postcard can be one of your promo cards or one you draw with the message simply saying “VOTE NO on Bill S.2913” for the Senate and “VOTE NO on H.R.5889” for the House.

3. Mail ASAP!

They said to just keep it simple with the VOTE NO and the bill # and send to both the House and Senate.

Rather than send these to the DC offices, send them to your local and state
district offices because mail to Washington takes longer to scan and mail to
the district offices are sent by courier to DC and accepted in rather than scanned.

Go to http://capwiz.com/gag/dbq/officials and type in your zip and you
will get the contact info for your district offices for your
legislators.

The IPA wants as many of these post cards to reach the Senators and
Reps by the time they meet with them June 4th and 5th.

Additional things you can do are call your district and DC legislators
offices and voice your opinion encouraging them to vote no on the bill
and fax your letters to both the DC and district offices as well.

You can still send email letters at http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/
so far over 83,000 letters have been sent from this site.

Even if you have already sent letters and made calls please send them
again! And… Please participate in this postcard mailing and get your
voices heard on the Orphan Works Bill.

Thank you so much.

The NUJ has called on US lawmakers to back journalists and other creators and reject a controversial Bill currently before the Senate.

The Bill would undermine creators rights in protecting their work and make it easier for companies to steal images, words and other work by claiming they did not know who the creator was…

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

The Orphan Works Act: Warning to the Public

Should the general public care about the Orphan Works Act?
Yes, because the effects of this bill will expose any citizen’s visual images to infringement, including infringement for commercial purposes or distasteful uses.

Most people don’t understand current copyright law. But under current law, they don’t have to – the law itself protects them from not understanding it. Anything you create is considered your private property.

But under this amendment, all citizens would be required to understand that they must now take active steps – not to actually protect their work (because registries won’t protect it) – but merely to preserve their right to sue an infringer in federal court (in case they ever find out they’ve been infringed in the first place).

Otherwise, ignorance of copyright law will be be no excuse against an infringer who has done a “reasonably diligent search” for a photo he found on a blog, photo sharing site, Facebook page, or other source.

Proposal for Copyright Warning and Public Awareness Campaign
If this bill is passed, copyright will no longer be considered the exclusive right of the creator. Therefore, Congress should direct the Copyright Office to commence an awareness campaign to be conducted in all media, explaining to all copyright holders the new terms of copyright protection. Public warnings should state at least the following:

“Due to a change in US copyright law, citizens should now be aware that any creative expression they put into tangible form – from professional artwork to family photos – will be subject to infringement, including infringement for commercial uses, by anyone in the United States who is unable to locate them by what the infringer determines – and a court agrees – to be a reasonably diligent search.

“To preserve your right to sue infringers in federal court, you are advised to take active steps to assert authorship of every work you create.

“These steps will include inserting meta-data in each work, marking each work with a copyright symbol and contact information and registering each work in commercial databases where infringers can search for your work.

“Ignorance of copyright law will be be no excuse against an infringer who has done a “reasonably diligent search” according to guidelines established by Congress.”

This should be the minimum warning information and it should be issued to the public on an on-going basis to alert successive generations of the legal obligations they will have to observe as the price of creating art of any kind. We also ask Congress to direct the Copyright Office to establish and maintain local law clinics where creators and other citizens can seek clarification about their obligations under Orphan Works law.

Don’t Let Congress Orphan Your Work

You can urge Congress to oppose these bills by linking here to a special letter.
Tell Your Senators and Representatives to Oppose the Orphan Works Act at:
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11442621

Please forward this message to every artist you know.

If you received our mail as a forwarded message, and wish to be added to our mailing list, email us at: ipa@twcny.rr.com Place “Add Name” in the subject line, and provide your name and the email address you want used in the message area.
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