The Orphan Works Roundtable and Webcast
Hosted by the Office of Advocacy of the
U.S. Small Business Administration on 08/08/2008 in NY
How Will the Orphan Works
Bill Economically Impact Small Entities?
http://videos.cmitnyc.com/asip.html
“A Seminal Event”
“Unprecedented”
“The most effective advocacy in
opposition to these bills I have seen.”
“The Gathering of the Tribes”
These are some of the comments we’ve received from last Friday’s Roundtable on Orphan Works, conducted by the Small Business Administration. Artists, photographers, songwriters, musicians, writers and spokesmen for collateral businesses all made this the best attended Roundtable the SBA has conducted.
As one member of the audience said, perhaps the only good thing about the Orphan Works bill is that it’s brought so many creative communities together. The full house is the best measure of the concern creators have about this effort to undermine copyright law.
Key points to emerge from the discussion:
- The high cost of digitizing and registering work with commercial databases will make compliance impossible for most artists.
- This will cause billions of unregistered works to fall into the public domain.
- To make money, commercial databases will have to promote and facilitate infringement.
- Infringer-friendly databases will compete with artists for clients.
As one panelist summed up:
this bill “will socialize costs and privatize profits.”
To learn more about who was there visit the IPA Blog
LEARN MORE & TAKE ACTION
AGAINST THESE BILLS: www.owoh.org
Please forward this message and link to every copyright holder you know.
How sad this word Orphan could become so abusive
but how wonderful to unite all of the creative people in a force to be reckoned with for future problems.
Bravo to all who are standing up to this damaging law that is full of ignorance and lack of proper study ahead of time. Keep up the knowledge and unity!
To my best understanding since the bill is still on “hold” we need to continue the process of reaching out to our congress. IT IS NOT LAW YET. Clearly explain to them that we OPPOSE this legislation. Keep encouraging all creatives (writers, musicians, artists etc. . .) to get involved. We can’t sit by and assume that “someone else” will take care of this – we need to stand together!!!
Sign the petition, write them again and again. They need to know that is is NOT OK to “orphan” the work of legitimate copyright holders for the benefit of private profits. Not only will it put creatives in this country out of work (why hire what you can steal for free), but it will be detrimental to our economy (bankrupt artists that are out of business) and to our FUTURE cultural heritage (no new art).
this is so frustrating–i wrote to my representatives about this a while back and they wrote back to say the vote had already occured and that (unsurprisingly) they had voted the opposite of what indie artists would hope for–is there anything else left that we can still do, given that the vote has occurred already?