Do I have your attention? I hope so!

The Orphan Works Act of 2008 will take away the automatic protection that artists now have. Currently in the US if you take a picture, or make a piece of art you automatically own the copyright, and before someone uses of for their own purpose they have to obtain/purchase rights from you.

In essence the new law makes so that to retain copyright, you have to have it registered in a database (yep every image), and if it’s not found in the database the the person who wants to use it, then that work may be freely copied. They will do this by developing huge private certified software databases.

Soooo… every image you have ever created must be registered for you to retain copyright! That’s billions of photographs. Since that will never happen and all those photographers will instantly loose copyright protection.

If this passes, the government becomes steward of copyright, you essentially loose copyright to every image you have ever created, and all past, current and future work comes under the control of government. All it does is make stealing copyright really really easy.

Take Action… You can go to this site for specific details on the bill. You can also email your senators automatically right from the page as well.

by Gavin Seim
Thanks to Michael