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You Lose! Orphan Works Bill About to Pass...

  2. shampton
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The fast-tracked Orphaned Works bill (soon making its way through Congress) will make it possible for people and business to use your images without your consent or knowledge. Though well-intentioned, it leaves all artists, especially photographers and illustrators, vulnerable.

Orphan works legislation is entirely for the benefit of the user community at the expense of the copyright owner community, particularly the creators of visual artworks (insert the name of your favorite local, indie artist here). H.R. 5889 erodes the rights of artists.

In short, if the legislation passes, we loose our immediate copyright on every doodle, snapshot, beat, or thought we jot down. A person who stumbles across it in any medium who wants to use the piece but can't find the copyright owner (and they determine the adequate effort in finding the originator which could be absolutely no effort whatsoever) then they will be free to use the image, writing, audio/video clip, however they see fit whether it be for a profit or not.

http://www.nikondigital.org/dps/dps-v-4-08.htm
shampton

18 responses // You Lose! Orphan Works Bill About to Pass...

  • Is this really so bad? Maybe copyright could use a little loosening up. :-)
    sloan
  • you clearly don't earn your living as an artist!
    SeaJade
  • Yeah, this is a good thing, on balance, and the hysteria is simply inaccurate.
    Blazesboy
  • @SeaJade I'm certainly not an expert on this stuff, but my sense is that copyright as it exists today benefits big corporations (and, okay, small corporations too) a lot more than it does individuals, and artists.

    I'm a pretty big fan of stuff like Creative Commons, which makes the argument that creative reuse & remixing of content strongly benefits the creator.

    And so much of art is about reappropriation, copying, and stealing -- (and that's a good thing, not a bad thing) -- that it seems to me that strict, rigid copyright is actually an enemy of art.
    sloan
  • http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/
    Take Action: Don't Let Congress Orphan Your Work
    SeaJade
  • It's a double-edged sword.

    The Copyright Office exists to serve both the public AND the copyright owners.

    To be clear, the bill: makes it legal for anyone desiring to use a copyrighted work for any purpose to go ahead and use it without a license if they have made "good faith, reasonably diligent search" to locate the copyright owner.

    I disagree with @sloans assesment. while I concur, and I feel Creative Commons is a good thing for art and copyright, for those artists who rely on income from their art, this bill hurts them and makes it easier for people to appropriate their work without any compensation.

    Let's apply the notions of free copyright above to the following examples:

    A work of art like the Mona Lisa:
    "I tried getting in touch of the copyright owner(holder in this case), but couldn't, so I will go ahead and make a 1000 t-shirts with the Mona Lisa on them to sell."

    A snapshot of your baby:
    "Ad/Network Exec: we made a reasonably diligent search to contact them on flickr, but didn't get a reply so we're going ahead with our advertising campaign that relies on using this image heavily."

    A CD from your favorite band:
    "I made a reasonably diligent search: i.e. contacted them through myspace, but didn't get an email back). I will go ahead and use their songs for the documentary I am making and selling online."

    Just some food for thought:

    We argue in favor of a communal/open-source system...but does individuality suffer? Does it become a hybrid form of decentralized communism? the good of the society trumps that of the individual? what benefits to society does this bill present? and what stakeholders stand to benefit? When do the rights of the public outweigh the rights of the individual?
    shampton
  • Three more examples from ASMP:
    The client of a social (Wedding/Event/Portrait/Sports) photographer wants reprints. They look in the yellow pages and can't find the photographer listed anymore. Off to the photo lab and never look back.

    Your image is used in a publication, uncredited as is increasingly the case, and the publisher gets bought or closes it's doors and can't be reached. This bill could be interpreted as giving anyone free reign to pirate the images in the publication.

    Your artwork/image is pirated and put on the web. Someone sees it, likes it, and wants to use it. Since it is pirated they don't know who you are (and of course the meta-data has been stripped) so they can't try to reach you, so they can--potentially legally--go ahead and use the image without further compensation to you. If you take the trouble to track them down and sue them the most you can recover is what your initial license fee would have been. Hardly an incentive to try to find violators.
    shampton
  • seriously one more step to erasing the individual in this society and muddling the average persons ability to fight back against 'giants'.
    perlpunk
  • Viva Creative Commons! I'm all for digital freedom!

    If you're so worried about having your images stolen, just put a copyright on it. It's built into such sites like Flickr already.
    renbyrd
    2 responses to this
  • you might be interested then in the story of rebekka, who had her images stolen off flickr and were being sold on a stock photo site :)

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/rebba/2243426607/
    shampton
  • Jeebus, that is SO not cool. So many blogs are going to get shut down :(

    What about Flickr? Is this the famed "fair use" demanding to be made legal?
    Elligirl
  • huh.

    "The Office received broad support for its Report and proposed solution, with the exception of photographers and some other owners of visual content. However, despite their opposition to legislation, visual artists have openly acknowledged the magnitude of the orphan works problem in their own community. One concern of photographers is that their works are sometimes perceived to be orphans when they are not really orphans. This is because photographs and other images are often published without credit lines or copyright notices. They do not always have metadata or watermarks. Certain categories of images are not routinely managed or licensed. These are genuine problems, but they are in fact the very essence of the orphan works problem."
    Elligirl
  • Copyright laws suck. All art is derivative. If music copyrights were as strict as they are with film and video we would never have hip-hop. The only way for film and video to reach the next level as an art form is to get rid of copyright altogether. Otherwise we’ll just keep recycling old TV shows into bad movies.
    maston
  • Anyone can pirate almost any image or sound off the web right now, so I'm not sure how this law will harm or curtail copyright infringement.

    If you create something of value that you make your livelihood from, it's common sense to protect it with watermarks, meta tags, low resolution, partial clips, etc. Make it obvious it's restricted and make it easy to contact the creator.

    Remember, once you publish something (in print, web or tv) and can prove you were first to do it (date/time stamp) – it is inherently copyrighted.
    Eyeful
  • for those that oppose the bill you can go to www.owoh.org
    noorphans
  • I feel a sense of betrayal from governments when you work to protect the rights of the work you had created to learn that the some of the work you had created is no longer yours. My life ambitions and everyone else's artistic imagery should be orphaned to the public and saved by money upsets me.
    ColossalView

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