Orphan Works Act passes the Senate–Don’t let it pass the House, too

The Senate wasn’t so busy bailing out Wall Street and Big Business that it couldn’t find time to betray small businesses who “manufacture” art, photographs, music, and other creative work.

The onerous Orphan Works Bill passed the Senate last week, like sticking it to the nations creatives was even more important than extracting the nation from the investment banks crumbling all around us. Unbelievable! How could this possibly happen when all of our Senators’ efforts were supposedly focused on the Wall Street meltdown? The answer to that question is right in plain sight — the practice of “hotlining” bills, explained in this blog post by the Illustrators Partnership: Orphan Works: The Devil’s Own Day – Never Too Busy to Pass Special Interest Legislation

What’s the fuss? “Orphan Works” are images (or music, written works, etc.) whose creator cannot be identified. The proposed bill would make it trivially easy to infringe (steal) any copyrighted work by claiming it is “orphaned.” Under the proposed bill, all someone needs to do to use an image is to do a “reasonable search” for the artist or other copyright owner. If one isn’t found, without any further proof, they can claim they are using an orphaned image!

Think about this: How easy is it to download an image from the web, attach it to email and honestly loose track of where it came from. Now think about how much dishonest people could get away with by removing signatures and watermarks from images with a couple of mouse clicks in Photoshop. All they would have to do to avoid being charged with infringement would be to say that they tried to find the artist and couldn’t.

For very good reason, creative professionals feel betrayed by this reversal of copyright protection for their stock in trade. It is easy enough to steal images under the current law, as my experience with art theft shows. This bill’s disregard of artists’ property rights is like making it legal for a squatter to take possession of land just because they don’t know how to look up the deed.

Our only hope now is that the House of Representatives will fail to pass its version of the bill, HR 5889, before it recesses. Whether you are an artist or not, please take the time to protest this outright betrayal of creative professionals’ property rights. The Illustrators’ Partnership web site makes it easy to send an email to your representative from an artist (photographers and musicians included), small business owner, or concerned citizen. Go write your Representative NOW — no time to delay.

And remember: Every member of the House will be re-elected in a couple of weeks. You may want to remind them of that in your letter!