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Your Creative Life Interrupted

This is a very important week for your creative future. We hear the House Judiciary Committee is about to mark-up H.R. 5889, the Orphan Works 2008 bill. This means it could go to the floor to be scheduled for a vote later in the week. You do not want this to happen. Click on the image below to be taken to how to quickly act now.

Stop Orphan Works 2008 legislation

Stop Orphan Works 2008 legislation!

Learn more about why your should oppose Orphan Works 2008. Then put us in your Twitter, Tumblr, all your social bookmarks!

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing. - Robert Bresson Sphere: Related Content

Urgent! Orphan Works Action Alert!!

Monday, July 14, 2008

(PLEASE distribute this to all your friends. And PLEASE use the social bookmarking links at the bottom of this post.)

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

We’ve had word that the House Judiciary Committee may mark-up the Orphan Works Bill this week.

This is the session where Committee Members will propose, accept and reject amendments to H.R. 5889. After markup, the bill could be reported out of the House Committee and go to the floor for a vote.

We’ve submitted several critical amendments for consideration: These would limit the scope of the bill to affect only true orphaned work. Unless such amendments are adopted, we believe the bill should not be reported out until its impact on small businesses can be determined. Here’s our summary of the issues at stake in the House version of this bill:

(Take Action link.)

Q What is the Orphan Works Act?
A: A proposed amendment to copyright law that would impose a radically new business model on the licensing of copyrighted work.

Q: How would it do that?
A: It would force all creators to digitize their life’s work and hand it over to privately-owned commercial databases or see it exposed to widespread infringement by anyone, for any purpose, however commercial or distasteful.

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Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing. - Robert Bresson Sphere: Related Content

Orphan Works 2008 - ouch!

Orphan Works legislation currently before the U.S. Congress will be very bad for you and your family, no matter where you live. It will be good for the shareholders of Big Media.

You decide who you love, then get involved, please!

There is no time to waste.

Please go here to find out more:

Orphan Works Opposition Headquarters

Pro-Imaging Opposes Orphan Works information page.

Quick Links to the Legislative Action Center

Recent News

A group of thirty advocates, including yours truly, went to Washington, D.C., this past week and spoke to the staff of many Senators and Representatives. We represented more than 80 creative groups from the world over. We had very good results educating Congress people who had never heard of the bill until very recently. That, of course, was by the design of commercial interests who had a large hand in funding and writing the text of the bills.

You need not be a professional image creator to be affected by this bill. Anything you ever posted to the web will be fair game for infringement unless you go through a vague and undefined registration process whose fee is yet to be determined. Want to see your MySpace images advertising something embarrassing to you? It could well happen if you don’t register every image you ever made in those vaguely defined commercial databases, and if you don’t register each image with the Copyright Office ($30+/each). Sounds bizarre, but real lawyers for real big media companies wrote exactly that.

That’s not all the bad news, but that is enough for now.

You will do no harm actively opposing this bill through the links above.

  • A much better bill can be written that cuts out the commercial interests entirely and gives real protection to artists while providing needed services to libraries and museums.
  • Call your Congress people in Washington, D.C., then follow up with email! They do like hearing from you! Really!

A big thank you

Many thanks to the following Congressional staffers who met with our Massachusetts delegation:

  • Meghan Morris
  • Noelle Melton
  • Kaitlin McColgan
  • Kevin McDermott
  • Sarah Bontempo
  • Lisa Salerno
  • Jenn Walters
  • Bruce Fernandez
  • Lindsay Ross
  • David Posen
  • Davida Walsh
  • Christine Hunt
  • Sarah Bontempo
  • Andrew Kohn
  • Maggie Juliand
  • M. Pilar Falo
  • Roberto Peña

Our sincere thanks to you all for meeting with us. We greatly appreciate you and your work on our behalf.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing. - Robert Bresson Sphere: Related Content

Web Work, working for you

Getting yourself and your message on the internet has never been easier. Let me show a few examples.

website thumbnail

Pro-Imaging is an international support group for professional image makers. They needed a site where members could post news, upload images to their personal gallery space, blog, and have a private forum. The CMS they chose was Joomla!. Joomla! is a complete solution with many features, both for individual needs, and a group website. You manage it and contribute content from your browser.

website thumbnail

Local 3 needed a simple, functional presence to post occasional news items. Dreamweaver fit the bill. They would now like to increase their capabilities and are looking into a CMS solution. Dreamweaver is quite a capable application for building websites, but they are leaning toward WordPress for it’s ease of use and quick set up.

Keep Reading »

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing. - Robert Bresson Sphere: Related Content

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