They're at it Again! Stop Orphan Works Bill!

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS' PARTNERSHIP
According to our sources THE HOUSE WILL TRY TO PASS THE ORPHAN WORKS BILL TODAY 10.3.08

**If this Bill is only meant to help libraries and museums, why did they draft it behind closed doors?

**Why have the doors been opened wide for commercial infringement of the work of living authors actively licensing their work?
**Why do they want to pass it when nobody is looking?
**Why do they want to re-write copyright law without an open debate?

Stop this effort to give content to Big Internet firms by under mining copyright law. Get the word out!

Light up Washington and home offices of your Congressman.
Contact the media.· Deny them cover. Do not let them hide.
Tell them we will hold each of them accountable.
Here is the message to communicate to your Congressman, Key Leaders,

Aides and Media:

** The "Dark Archive" - where infringers can register their paperwork in secret - will not protect our copyrights.

**An "Open Archive" - with orphaned work exposed to to the public -would be a come-and-get-it bank for plagiarists and infringers.

**Artists cannot monitor tens or hundreds of thousands of images everyday to see if somebody somewhere has infringed their work.

**There are more than a trillion images subject to orphaning each day.

**If someone can't find me, that doesn't mean I've orphaned my work.
An unsuccessful search for a property owner should not be a license to steal.

**Artists should not have to digitize their life's work at their own expense to comply with a law they don't want or need.

**The high cost compliance would make compliance prohibitive.

**The loss of exclusive rights would undermine contractual agreements with clients.

**We cannot sell exclusive rights to clients if others can publish our work without our knowledge or consent.

**The loss of exclusive rights would devalue our entire inventories of work.

**Small business owners should not be forced to subsidize the business models of Big Internet firms.

**No rational business owner should have to give access to their inventory, meta data, client contact information, etc. to outside business interests.

**Tell lawmakers to prevent passage of this bill until it can be subjected to an open, informed and transparent public examination.

**Tell them this is no way to re-write copyright law.

**Tell them it will affect millions of rights holders worldwide.

**Tell them you would support a true orphan works bill, but this is not it.

**Tell them to to consider the amendments presented by the Illustrator's Partnership, Artists Rights Society and Advertising Photographers of America

Phone, fax, email these Congress people immediately:
DELAHUNT Phone: (202) 225-3111
Fax (202) 225-5658
CONYERS Phone: (202) 225-5126
Fax: (202) 225-0072
Phone: (313) 961-5670
Fax: (313) 226-2085
NADLER Phone: (202) 225-5635
Fax: (202) 225-6923
Phone: (212) 367-7350
Fax: (212) 367-7356
BERMAN Phone: (202) 225-4695
Fax: (202) 225-3196
Phone: (818) 994-7200
Fax: (818) 994-1050
PELOSI :AmericanVoices@mail.house.gov
Phone: (202) 225-4965
Fax: (202) 225-8259
Phone: (415) 556-4862
Fax: (415) 861-1670
HOYER steny.hoyer@mail.house.gov
Phone: (202) 225-4131
Fax: (202) 225-4300
Phone: (301) 474-0119
Fax: (301) 474-4697

YOUR REPRESENTATIVE
To find Washington and District Office phone, fax and web forms for your Representative http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/dbq/officials/ and enter your zip code

YOUR LOCAL MEDIA
To find the contacts for your Local Media go to http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/dbq/media/
and enter your zip code

This release was written by Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner,
for the Board of the Illustrators' Partnership
Please post or forward this message immediately to any interested party.
For news and information:
Illustrators' Partnership Orphan Works Blog:http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/
Over 75 organizations oppose this bill, representing over half a million creators.

Why I'm feeling Icky...

Last night, while the nation was distracted by the bailout plan, the Senate passed the Orphan Works Bill. I've been working at opposing this bill for six months now. It is oh so obvious that congress is trying to slip it in under the radar. This act will affect all artists, writers, choreographers, photographers etc. it is important that we act now to stop it becoming law. Over 70 creators organizations are opposed to this bill and working hard to stop its passage.
Please write your congress rep by clicking below. You'll find a simple form letter that will seriously only take two minutes to complete.
Please help!
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11980321
xo,
Amber

If you'd like to read more about it:
For more info: http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/

This is overview of how this bill will affect the art world: excerpts from:
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/bills/?billid=11320236

**The Orphan Works Act defines an "orphan work" as any copyrighted
work whose author any infringer says he is unable to locate with what the infringer himself decides has been a "reasonably diligent search."In a radical departure from existing copyright law and business practice, the U.S. Copyright Office has proposed that Congress grant such infringers freedom to ignore the rights of the author and use thework for any purpose, including commercial usage. In the case of visual art, the word "author" means "artist."

** This proposal goes far beyond current concepts of fair use.
As acknowledged by the Register of Copyrights it is not designed to deal with the special situations of non profit museums, libraries and archives. It is written so broadly that it will expose new works to infringement, even where the author is alive, in business, and licensing the work.

** The bill would substantially limit the copyright holder's ability to recover financially or protect the work, even if the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office prior to infringement.

**The bill has a disproportionate impact on visual artists because it
is common for an artist's work to be published without credit lines or because credit lines can be removed by others for feckless or unscrupulous reasons. This is especially true of art published in the Internet Age.Coerced Registration

**The Orphan Works Act would force artists to risk their lives' work to subsidize the start-up ventures of private, profit making registries, using untested image recognition technology and untried business models. These models would inevitably favor the aggregation of images into corporate databases over the licensing of copyrights by the lone artists who create the art.

**The most common scenario of orphaning in visual art is the unmarked image. There is only one way to identify the artist belonging to an unmarked image. That would be to match the art against an image-recognition database where the art resides with intact authorship information.

**These databases would become one-stop shopping centers for infringers to search for royalty-free art. Any images not found in the registries could be considered orphans.

**There is no limit to the number of these registries nor the prices they would charge artists for the coerced registration of their work.

**The artist would bear the financial burden of paying for digitizing and depositing the digitized copy with the commercial registries.

**Almost all visual artists such as painters, illustrators and photographers are self employed. The number of works created by the average visual artist far exceeds the volume of the most prolific creators of literary, musical and cinematographic works. The cost and time-consumption to individual artists of registering tens of thousands of visual works, at even a low fee, would be prohibitive;therefore countless working artists would find countless existing works orphaned from the moment they create them.

**The Copyright Office has stated explicitly that failure of the artist to meet this nightmarish bureaucratic burden would result in his work automatically becoming an "orphan" and subject to legal infringement.