Newsroom
Oppose the "Orphan Works" Bill
Posting Date: 12-05-2008
The United States Congress and Senate are currently (and not for the first time) considering a bill intended to address the problem of "orphan works", i.e. works owned by parties who cannot be found or identified, thereby denying said works' use in research, education etc. for fear of infringement.
Many artists in the US believe that the bill will remove the immediate and inherent copyright protection from all new work, "orphaning" all artistic work unless it is protected via registration on visual databases, databases that at present do not exist but are anticipated to be run entirely within the private sector. The legal onus will rest on the artist to register- at an as yet unknown level of expense- each and every piece of work they have ever created. This penalises individual artists and benefits corporations, who could exploit any unmarked material they come across (or, in the worst case scenario, remove the mark) and in the event of a challenge merely have to prove they made a "diligent" effort to find the copyright holder- an elastic term that could mean nothing more than a Google search.
Apart from constituting a violation of American artists' creative rights, this bill could have a big impact on visual artists outwith the USA. The Illustrators' Partnership of America have compiled a letter explaining the issue and the SAU encourage you to read it by following the link below.
Weblink: http://www.IllustratorsPartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00267
