The Orphan Works Bill

[Nauk]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqBZd0cP5Yc
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/
http://www.sellyourtvconceptnow.com/orphan.html

I don't know if this bill has passed the US congress yet, but if it has or does it would galactically suck and as understand it affect quite many here too.

[Praetorian]

That is really scary... I did some googling and found this: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/0 ... ks-co.html. And wikipedia had some more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works

I guess it's at least stalled for now...

[jacmoe]

That's outrageously unbelieveable..
I mean, even if it's USA, it seems to be really far out - have to admit that I didn't actually read the bill - what's the motivation behind this?

[Klaim]

I think they just want to simplify the usage of media found on internet, by allowing the other media to use it without asking the author.

That's not a good idea...

[Benny Lava]

Damn, that's no good.

Reminds me of another bill that would make it near-impossible for scientists who use public funding to make their work freely available. In both cases, common sense and decency are overriden by corporate interests.

[nikki]

Damn, that's no good.

Reminds me of another bill that would make it near-impossible for scientists who use public funding to make their work freely available. In both cases, common sense and decency are overriden by corporate interests.

Your name cracks me up.

[Pyritie]

Oh not this bill again. This thing always gets blown way out of proportion.

Here, read this: http://realitysquared.deviantart.com/journal/18227968

[Kencho]

AFAIK it will be up to the judges to say whether a search was "intensive enough" or not. That is, big corporations will be able to stomp little-known artists' works as they please.

I really hope this won't go any further than its current state. If this bill is approved, I won't ever release any work publicly in Internet, or at least versions with any decent quality.

[Nauk]

If this bill is approved, I won't ever release any work publicly in Internet, or at least versions with any decent quality.

That is the sad and real outcome of it :/ . The consequences are dramatic enough to change the nature of internet for creative people on a global scale, turning it from a place where you could happily share your creations with the big wide world into something you better stay away from, because some company might see and register it before you do and then sue you for using your own works...this really is the height of a perverted farce, yet reality.

Conceptart.org has come up with a very good and nifty idea to fend off the consequences of full blown and full in effect Orphan Works Bill. They simply created an art-registry forum that somehow matches the requirements of a copyright registry. The forum works like a showcase and by posting your work in it, your work becomes automatically registered and protected against the orphaned status. Maybe something like that could be created here too? No clue how much extra effort it would be and how doable it is. Anyway you can see it in action here: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=152 and read more about it here: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showth ... p?t=145485 - Kudos to the Massive Black guys and the Conceptart.org team for that, they did an amazing job trying to organise a resistance movment.

[Kencho]

Supposedly that also works with other sites like deviantART and CGSociety, but I'm not very sure about what "an intensive search" means. Intensive is such a subjective term that can easily be perverted to help the wrong people.

[Kojack]

It took 93 years to get america to drop it's mandatory copyright registrations and join the Berne Convention with most of the rest of the world, now only 20 years later they are going to quit?
If this gets through, I hope the WTO doesn't go lightly on them.

[jacmoe]

The rest of the world has lesser meaning over there.

[darke]

I believe they're already in violation of WTO rules over their gambling legislation, so I can't imagine the legislators will care about one more violation that no one's doing anything about.

In any event, if copyrights weren't held for such an obscenely long time (life plus + 50 or 70 years?), orphan works wouldn't be such a big deal since you aren't potentially trying to chase down the descendants of someone who died decades ago, or someone who published a work in there 20's but is now retired in another country, herding goats on a mountain top in an area only accessible for travel 3 days every year.