Are we losing our rights to unregistered copyrights?
There's a myspace interview circulating that talks about the Orphan Works Act of 2008, which is now before the House of Representatives. There's some broad conversation that we're losing our ability to defend common law (they mean unregistered) copyrights and that everyone will have to register every work that they create in order to be able to claim copyright in their work. Quite a few people are up in arms about this.
Ok, before anyone gets their knickers in a knot, I took a look at the bill... I believe that their assesment of what you will own and not own is incorrect.
What the proposed act says is that if, after a diligent search, a person (who under the current law would be considered an infringer) cannot find the rightful owner of a copyright that they may file a notice of use with the Copyright Office and, giving as much attribution as they can find, they may use the copyrighted work for any purpose, including commercial ones.
Congress also proposes making a database for graphic, pictoral and sculptural work to enable those copyright holders to be found by potential infringers. They don't specify whether there would be a charge for entering your work in the database though...
However, if you were to find that your work was being infringed, you can bring an action against the infringer (they're looking at a dispute arbitration system for smaller businesses and copyright holders to make it less of a burden on the rightful copyright holder) and they have to pay you for the use of your copyrighted work.
True, the law would certainly be a pain for copyright holders. But to me, all that this means for most copyrighted works is that you have to make sure that you put copyright notice on all of your work and make sure you can be easily found from the information that you include.
If you want to take a look at the Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R. 5889), you can find it here. By the way, this bill has been kicking around for several years in different forms. For whatever it's worth, it has never passed.
If it really bugs you, as my mom would say when we would tell her that something was unfair, "Write your Congressman". In that vein, if you want to prevent the bill from passing, take a look at who sponsored the bill and make sure they're not re-elected in the fall....
Ok, before anyone gets their knickers in a knot, I took a look at the bill... I believe that their assesment of what you will own and not own is incorrect.
What the proposed act says is that if, after a diligent search, a person (who under the current law would be considered an infringer) cannot find the rightful owner of a copyright that they may file a notice of use with the Copyright Office and, giving as much attribution as they can find, they may use the copyrighted work for any purpose, including commercial ones.
Congress also proposes making a database for graphic, pictoral and sculptural work to enable those copyright holders to be found by potential infringers. They don't specify whether there would be a charge for entering your work in the database though...
However, if you were to find that your work was being infringed, you can bring an action against the infringer (they're looking at a dispute arbitration system for smaller businesses and copyright holders to make it less of a burden on the rightful copyright holder) and they have to pay you for the use of your copyrighted work.
True, the law would certainly be a pain for copyright holders. But to me, all that this means for most copyrighted works is that you have to make sure that you put copyright notice on all of your work and make sure you can be easily found from the information that you include.
If you want to take a look at the Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R. 5889), you can find it here. By the way, this bill has been kicking around for several years in different forms. For whatever it's worth, it has never passed.
If it really bugs you, as my mom would say when we would tell her that something was unfair, "Write your Congressman". In that vein, if you want to prevent the bill from passing, take a look at who sponsored the bill and make sure they're not re-elected in the fall....
posted by Deena B. Burgess, Esq. at
8:59 AM
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