Orphaned Works Bill

THIS IS IMPORTANT!

This bill, which has recently been released to congress, breaks international copyright law and will legalize theft of creative work. It basically mandates that all work anyone creates in the future or has created within the past 34 years must be registered with registries that have not even been created yet in order for the creator to maintain their copyright to the work. If works you create, including everyday pictures and videos you take, are not registered, they can legally be used by anyone else however they want to use them without anyone asking or paying you for their use.

Depending on how many registries are created, creators may be required to register their work with many different registries. For each registry, they will have to pay a fee for every work registered. Even if this is a low fee, this will cost artists thousands and thousands of dollars. They will have to register EVERY sketch, painting, drawing, picture, etc. they have ever created if they want to keep anyone else from using it. When you consider that many artists create hundreds to thousands of sketches and works each year, you can start to understand how staggering this is to an artist. Even so, registering one's work will not completely protect it from being stolen and used by others as there are many holes that work could fall through or ways that users could get around the registries to claim a work as "orphaned.". Furthermore, it will ultimately be up to individual artists to search out and find any unauthorized uses of their own work (which is something they hardly have time for).

I realize you are all busy, but this is terribly important, especially to me and any other artist or person in the creative fields. Please, please help us protect our creative works! If you know anyone in the creative field, please pass this information on to them. Also, it would be appreciated if you took the time to contact your representatives about this yourselves as well. Go to http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml to quickly find the phone number, address, and email of ebery U.S. senator, U.S. representative, governor, and state legislator.

You can read more about this bill and its implications here (I can't possibly include everything about it just in this blog.)

Also, this interview with Brad Holland, a top illustrator in today's market, gives a lot of insight and information about this bill as well. If you don't have time to listen to all of it, listening to just the beginning should still give you a lot of information on this bill.

You can also find updates about this bill or download copies of the actual bill at http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/

To easily send an email to your representatives, you can use this editable email template.

Thanks for your help!