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Orphan Rights Bill 2008
Sadly this has nothing to do with children losing their parents. It’s more about us losing our livelihoods
I had a read of this the other day. I can honestly say I was amazed as this bill reads like a Thieves Charter.
Anyone setting out to actively strip artists of their copyright and their means of earning a living couldn’t have done a better job.
If this becomes law we can only take photographs as a hobby as we will have to find another way of making a living
by
John Armstrong-Millar
at
Fri May 02 14:57:09 UTC 2008
(ed. Jun 16 2008)
pau,
France
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FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
You are cordially invited to attend an important industry-wide event
Don’t Let Congress Orphan Your Work
An open forum to oppose the Orphan Works Act of 2008
Tuesday, May 6 6:00 PM
The Society of Illustrators
128 East 63rd Street
New York, NY 10065
Admission will be free
The Orphan Works Act of 2008 will endanger the rights of anyone who creates intellectual property.
It will expose your art to commercial infringement. It will include work from professional paintings to family snapshots. It will include published and unpublished work. It will include any image that resides or has ever resided on the internet. It will force you to register every picture you do with privately-held commercial registries. It will make all unregistered works potential orphans.
This radical change to U.S. copyright law will shift the burden of diligence from infringers to rights holders. It is wrong to give infringers the right to make money from your property without your knowledge or consent. You should not have to pay businessmen to keep the work you’ve created.
The Orphan Works Act is an assault on national and international copyright laws. It’s an assault on the property and privacy rights embodied in them.
Illustrators, photographers, fine artists: let’s come together and act to keep Congress from orphaning our work.
This event will be webcast live.
Panelists at this forum will include:
- Brad Holland Hall of Fame artist who has testified against the Orphan Works Act of 2006 in both the House and Senate
- Cynthia Turner Award-winning medical artist who has collaborated in written testimony to both the House and Senate
- Constance Evans Photographer, painter and Executive Director of Advertising Photographers of America
- Terry Brown Director Emeritus of the Society of Illustrators, currently Director of the American Society of Illustrators Partnership
- Others to be announced
For additional background on Orphan Works, go to the IPA Orphan Works Resource Page for Artists
http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00185
If you received our mail as a forwarded message, and wish to be added to our mailing list, email us at: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.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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FOR MORE INFO and PETITION PLEASE CLICK HERE
Thanks!
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EPUK
Why the Orphan Works Act is Uncle Sam’s thieves’ charter
27 April 2008
The proposed US Orphan Works Act would dramatically shift the balance away from copyright holders, in favour of those who would like to use creative work without permission, argues EPUK moderator Tony Sleep…
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Photo Business News & Forum
Occasional Musings and News About the Business of Being a Photographer
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
by John Harrington
Orphan Works Act = Thieves Charter?
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I wrote an e-mail using the form at one of two Maryland senators` website, and I received a reply today. Although I do not vote in the US, I felt like not using the form letter. I just wrote that I am against it as a photographer.
It might be worthwhile expressing your concern even if you are not a US citizen, but if you live in the US. Also if you have a website, you are open to theft always. I have had six cases so far as far as I know. Since a number of them involved their removing my copyright notice, they have basically created orphan works.
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Thanks Yunghi and Tomoko. And thanks again posting this John.
From: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.com
Subject: Orphan Works: Behind the Talking Points
Date: May 9, 2008 1:40:10 PM MDT (CA)
To: IPA.IV
FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
Backers of the Orphan Works bill are circulating their Talking Points:
“Neither the House nor the Senate drafts of the bill contain the word “registries,” [they write] but rather they require users to search non-governmental databases of copyrighted works. The purpose of any database is not meant to take the place of copyright registration, but to have a way to search for visual images. Any participation in such a database would be voluntary.”
But this doesn’t mean what it appears to say. Take it point by point:
Talking Point #1: “Neither the House nor the Senate drafts of the bill contain the word ‘registries.’ ”
Response: Correct. They contain the word “databases,” a synonym:
Registry: register: an official written record of names or events or transactions
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Database: A database is a structured collection of records or data
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database
Q: Why a synonym?
A: Because international copyright law forbids member countries to impose registries as a condition of protecting copyrights: Berne/Article 5(2) ”The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality.” http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/5.html
In other words, if they used the word “registries” in the bills, it would be a red flag to other countries that the US is flirting with non-compliance with international treaties.
Talking Point #2: “…rather they [the bills] require users to search non-governmental databases of copyrighted works.”
Response: Non-governmental databases” means databases maintained in the private sector.
For users to find your work in these commercial databases, your work would first have to be in the database.
Work not in the database would be orphaned.
Talking Point #3: “Any participation in such a database would be voluntary.”
Response: Congress cannot pass a bill making registration mandatory because that would violate Berne/Article 5(2).
And that would state explicitly to other countries that the US no longer intends to honor its international agreements.
There are red flags all over these talking points.
Summing up: The Orphan Work bills would mandate the creation of registries by commercial interests.
You would not be legally forced to place your work with these for-profit registries.
But failure to do so would orphan your work.
The deceptive talking points accompanying this bill are another red flag.
— Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership
Take Action/ Write Congress http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/
Over 37,000 messages have been sent from the site in the last 48 hours. Please spread the word.
Please forward or post this announcement in its entirety to any interested party.
If you received our mail as a forwarded message, and wish to be added to our mailing list, email us at: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.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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From: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.comSubject: Orphan Works Catches Global Attention Date: May 7, 2008 4:11:36 PM MDT (CA) To: IPA.IV
FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
This article appeared today in Intellectual Property Watch
Intellectual Property Watch is a non-profit independent news service which reports on the interests and behind-the-scenes dynamics that influence the design and implementation of international intellectual property policies. It is based in Geneva Switzerland.
- SUPPORT MIXED FOR US ORPHAN WORKS BILL AS ISSUE CATCHES GLOBAL ATTENTION
By Dugie Standeford for Intellectual Property Watch
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1028
In an issue that may be rising internationally,* legislation pending in the United States Senate and House to free up use of “orphan works” whose copyright owners cannot be found has won strong support from the recording, webcasting and library sectors but faces challenges from visual artists and the textile industry…
Visual Artists, Textile Industry Opposed
Illustrators, photographers and other visual artists, however, are mobilising to challenge the proposal.
“Our chief objective to these bills is that they’ve been written so broadly their effect can’t be limited to true orphaned work,” Illustrators’ Partnership of America (IPA) founder Brad Holland told Intellectual Property Watch. Forcing anyone who creates a visual work, whether professional or personal, published or unpublished, to register it with yet-to-be-created commercial registries will cause users to rely increasingly on the companies to perform a diligent search, he said. Unregistered works could then be infringed as orphans, he said.
The proposals will disproportionately affect visual artists because paintings, drawings and photographs are often published without contact information, credit lines can be easily removed by others, and pictures can be separated from the publications in which they appear, Holland said. And because visual artists often produce many more works than the most prolific author or songwriter, it will cost them more time and money to register and maintain tens of thousands of registrations, he said.
The legislation will create a “gold mine for opportunists” as commercial archives harvest newly-created “orphans,” alter them slightly to make “derivative works,” and then register them as their own “creative works,” Holland said. In addition, coercive registration may violate the Berne Convention, which bars requiring “any formality” as a precondition to copyright protection, the IPA, Advertising Photographers of America and Artists Foundation of Massachusetts said in 30 April comments to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
TAKE ACTION: DON’T LET CONGRESS ORPHAN OUR WORK
2 minutes is all it takes to write Congress and protect your copyright:
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/
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: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.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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FOR MORE INFO and PETITION PLEASE CLICK HERE
Thanks EVERYBODY!
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FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
Some backers of the controversial Orphan Works bill say they’re launching a campaign to “Rescue Orphan Works.”
From whom?
We’re not the ones interested in infringing other people’s copyrights.
We’re only interested in protecting our own.
If the “Rescue Orphan Works” folks really want to use only true orphaned work, they’d join us in asking that this bill be drafted accordingly.
From our written statement submitted to the Senate April 30, 2008 http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/ow_docs
We believe the orphan works problem can be and should be solved with carefully crafted, specific limited exemptions.
• An exemption could be tailored to solve family photo restoration and reproduction issues.
• Usage for genealogy research is probably already covered by fair use, but could rate an exemption if deemed necessary.
• Limited exemptions could be designed for documentary filmmakers.
• Libraries and archives already have generous exemptions for their missions. However, if they believe they need expanded access to work whose authors are hard to find, we’d suggest that Congress adopt a variant of the Orphan Works clearance system in use in Canada.
Canada has created a statutory licensing scheme that allows licenses for the use of published works to be issued by the Copyright Board of Canada on behalf of unlocatable copyright owners.
The license is issued by the Canadian Copyright Board. Decisions are made on a case-by- case basis through application to the Board. If the Board is satisfied by the applicant’s efforts of e-mails, phone calls, written correspondence, approaches to copyright collectives, Internet searches, etc., then it may issue a non-exclusive license which is valid only in Canada, subject to any terms and conditions it sees fit.
DON’T LET CONGRESS ORPHAN YOUR WORK
2 minutes is all it takes to write Congress and protect your copyright:*
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/
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: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.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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Below is a Press Release that I just received from Rick Gersony, President of Medmovie in Lexington, KY. This press release comes from the Medical Illustration community (Association of Medical Illustrators/AMI http://www.ami.org/ECOMAMI/timssnet/common/tnt_frontpage.cfm)
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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We (AMI and IPA) are working on this right now as the bill is being fast tracked by Congress into law. It WILL be devastating to any creative small business owner that relies on their intellectual property to survive.
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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FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
Call to Action
Last Thursday the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed their Orphan Works Act.
It is now headed for the full Senate.
If you’ve written before, now’s the time to write again.
Urge your senator to oppose this bill.
Because it has been negotiated behind closed doors, introduced on short notice and fast-tracked for imminent passage without open hearings, ask that this bill not be passed until it can be exposed to an open, informed and transparent public debate.
We’ve drafted a special letter for this purpose.
You can deep link to it here:
Contact your Senator in opposition to S.2913 NOW: http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11389061
The House Judiciary Committee is considering H.R. 5889, the companion bill now. Please write them again:
Contact your Congressman in opposition to H.R. 5889 NOW at the following link: http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11389081
2 minutes is all it takes to write your senator and representatives and fight for your copyrights. Over 68,000 e-mail messages have been sent so far.
Don’t Let Congress Orphan Your Work
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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Stay tuned as there will be a scheduled anti-OW March on Washington.
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The Orphan Works bill has passed the sub committee hearings and may soon go before a full Senate vote.
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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.
2. Add your contact info to the post card:
Name
e-mail address and/or website address
Phone
Your regular address, or just city/state, plus ZIP Code
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.
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stay on top of big government by going to www.govtrack.us and you can see just where this ugly piece of legislation is.
So who are the people backing the bill? I’d really like to know names and addresses.
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David, I’ve been told that it’s an ironic combination of Free Culture Advocates who want to make a gift of artists’ work to the general public not realizing that their free gift of our hard work will end up directly in the pockets of Big Money Internet Corporations …like the search engine Google, who have much to gain economically through harvesting so called “orphaned” works off the internet so that they can sell usage of these so called “orphaned” images back to us for remix through subscription.
Also all the new registries that are already eagerly waiting to profit from the need to be set up to accommodate and enforce the coerced copyright registration that the OW Bill would put into law. Copyright Registries would be run commercially and for the company’s profit, not the artist’s.
....and then there are the libraries….
Orphan Works “will likely be a priority…this spring” for the House Judiciary Committee, writes Andrew Noyes in the National Journal, Feb. 21, 2008
According to Noyes, “American Library Association copyright specialist Carrie Russell said her members are ‘excited about having orphan works legislation’ move this session,” adding that if it does, “’we’ll be dancing in the streets.’” http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00258
Then there are a few misguided artists who are complaining either about fair use which is already provided for in the 1978 US Copyright Act mixed up in there with those few filmmakers who want to make a profit commercially from their film but are too cheap to pay those individuals for the use of their creative property in their movies.
The rest, Senators and the Bill’s backers as such are IMHO dirty politicians who are looking for more money to be given to them by Corporate sponsors than by a group of (as they called us last time) “unorganized” voices with no money and no knowledge of or concern for developing a profitable business sense through the commercial sale of our created product.
This style of thinking is based upon the common law also know as Adverse possession or “squatter’s rights”. Adverse possession is the process by which title to another’s real property is acquired without compensation, by, as the name suggests, holding the property in a manner that conflicts with the true owner’s rights for a specified period of time.
Plainly stated, this means the law does not reward a person who neglects to enforce his property rights by allowing him to claim the fruit of another person’s labor at a later time. Failure of the landowner (or in our case, the intellectual/creative property owners) to exercise and defend his/her property rights (or in our case commonly known as copyrights) for a certain length of time may result in the permanent loss of the landowner’s interest in the property.
The supporters and big corporate money backers of the two OW Bills now in Congress are gambling that we as artists will act like sheep headed straight for slaughter and won’t resist by speaking out to defend our property rights from those who seek to give them away to those who wish to own them for their future commercial profit.
Logically our copyrights can be compared to the ownership of our house and home. You wouldn’t allow anyone and everyone to just come in to live without paying rent or to just “squat” there on your property after you have spent your entire life scraping and saving to finally be financially free of that mortgage before you retire and sell your house so that you can afford to travel or move to Figi.
Some legal scholars have proposed to extend the concept of adverse possession to intellectual property law, in particular to reconcile intellectual property and antitrust law7 or to unify copyright law and property law.[8]
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From: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.comSubject: The Orphan Works Act: Warning to the Public Date: June 3, 2008 8:27:23 AM MDT (CA) To: IPA.IV
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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From: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.comSubject: Visual Artists Go to Washington Date: June 10, 2008 5:19:51 PM MDT (CA) To: IPA.IV
FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
Visual Artists Go to Washington, Independent Record Labels Oppose Orphan Works Act
Last week over two dozen visual artists, representing illustrators, photographers, fine artists and the arts licensing trades went to Capital Hill to explain to legislators how the Orphan Works Act will harm creators and the hundreds of thousands of art-related small businesses that serve and are dependent on them. At the same time, independent music labels have joined the opposition to orphan works legislation as it currently exists.
The Illustrators’ Partnership has stressed that Orphan Works legislation should be limited to true orphaned work and not act as an unwarranted compulsory license imposed on commercial markets. IPA, the Advertising Photographers of America and the Artists Rights Society have joined to offer amendments to that effect.
Excerpted from the Washington Internet Daily/Monday June 09, 2008:
The visual-arts community hit the Hill last week to protest what it portrays as a hijacking of the orphan-works issue as it was presented in a 2005 Copyright Office report…
The Copyright Office ran a bait-and-switch from its 2005 notice of intent, which focused on facilitating libraries’, museums’ and other nonprofits’ efforts to digitize collections to improve access to them, [Illustrators’ Partnership co-founder Brad] Holland said. Artists want the issue narrowed back to that focus, scrapping commercial use, he said…Copyright Office roundtables on orphan works never addressed alternates to registries, an “untested, untried, unaccountable market system” favoring Google, Getty, Corbis and other commercial aggregators, Holland said. [Cynthia] Turner [also of the Partnership] said artists would incur high costs registering works, and they hesitate to hand over high-res, commercial versions to Google or others.
In the same article, Washington Internet Daily also reports that the leading group of independent music labels has broken with the corporate music trade associations. The American Association of Independent Music has published a position paper opposing the current orphan works bills. The article quotes a music industry executive: “I can tell you that nobody in the music business” sought the bill.
... the executive said the bill is “de facto… establishing a new compulsory license” by putting unregistered artists at a legal disadvantage in court. The law can’t explicitly require registration or it will violate the Berne Convention, TRIPS and other treaties the U.S. has signed, the executive said. Book publishers and music executives in the U.K. think the U.S. will be in trouble, the executive said, citing a recent visit: “I can tell you there are European commissioners that are looking at this right now.”
-Excerpts from “Orphan-Works Bills Scorned by Visual Arts, Indie Labels” by Greg Piper, Washington Internet Daily June 09, 2008
Also see http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27803/visual-artists-and-indie-record-labels-voice-concern-over-orphan-works-bills/
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Thank you again, TF.
We’ve donated much of our time and our personal funds and money to preserve our intellectual property and copyrights. All we ask for is support.
We love you for yours, TF. This is ALL for our future and for our children’s.
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