Orphan Works press release from the House/Senate Judiciary Committees

[maradydd]

As promised, the press office of the Senate Judiciary Committee just sent me their release on the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008. (Thanks, y'all!) Below the cut, it's reproduced in full. The first section is a press release, i.e., the who (as in, who's sponsoring it), what (description of the bill), when (today), where (Washington, DC) and

Comments

[maradydd]

No problem! This is public information, so feel free to disseminate it widely. I haven't yet found a link to the press release, but if I find one I'll edit this post.

[vanbeast]

blammo.

[maradydd]

Sweet, thanks!

[patrickat]

Wow, it doesn't sound at all like the terrible copyright destroying monster that that the recent blog panic made it out to be.

[maradydd]

Yeah, funny how research bears fruit like that.

[phanatic]

I can see a larger company grabbing copyrighted content and using it, then keeping the artist tied up in court.

They can do that *now*. See Disney.

[maradydd]

I can see a larger company grabbing copyrighted content and using it, then keeping the artist tied up in court. That's my only real fear with this, is that the deep pockets of a large company could outlast the very likely shallow pockets of the individual artist.

I've heard this argument raised from a number of different directions, and it's an important thing to take into consideration; it's one I'll be discussing in detail when I post my analysis of the House and Senate bills (after I've had a chance to read them, that is).

The main thing to remember here is that this is an existing problem for artists under the status quo of US copyright law. Under the current system, if LargeCompany, Inc. infringes J. Random Artist's copyright, J. Random is looking at a lengthy court battle during which he'll need to show a preponderance of evidence (which is a legal standard widely used in civil courts -- it's less than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" that criminal courts require) that the original work belongs to him (easy, if J. Random has

[vanbeast]

I work for an animation studio where Mark Simon's article hit the mailing lists today. I pointed them to your post re: that before I knew that they had released this today.

If you're interested, I could pass along the summaries I wrote for them, though I'm sure you're ahead of me on that.

[maradydd]

Sure, I'd love to read them! You're welcome to post them here if you like, or you can drop me an email (maradydd@livejournal.com works).

[dejablu503]

Thanks for doing this, whenever I hear a politician say "But it's for the children" or "We are trying to do this for the public good" I develop a seizure sized twitch.... it makes me a very biased reader. It also makes me appreciate your lack of bias and input.