Senate seeks to "orphan" more art
By Katie Baker
Thousands of visual artists wrote to Congress after the Senate passed the Orphan Works Bill (S.2913) on Sept. 27, urging their House representatives not to follow suit. As of now they haven’t, but the arts community is worried that the House will pass quietly behind the enormous economic issues currently distressing the country.
"Passing controversial legislation by this process, i.e. under the radar, is deeply troubling to say the least," the Advertising Photographers of America wrote in an email alert last week. "Every Senator needs to be held accountable."
The bill would deem “orphaned” any copyrighted work whose author can’t be located by a "reasonably diligent search." Artists fear that vague standard could allow individuals and corporations to steals artwork for any personal or commercial purpose after going through the motions of search. The artwork could then to deemed part of the public domain, preventing creators from claiming ownership and compensation for their work.
In an age where one can find a plethora of artwork simply by searching through Google Images, the Orphan Works Act poses a huge problem for visual artists. According to an article written by the Illustrator's Partnership on www.capwiz.com (a grassroots political action web site service), "even if 10 users (or 100) can find a given artist, this bill will allow a single infringer who can defend in court his failure to find the artist, to establish that the artist's work was an orphan for legal purposes." All types of visual art – from professional paintings to vacation photos on Flickr accounts – qualify under the Act.
The Illustrator's Partnership argues that the Orphan Works Act would force artists to "subsidize the start-up ventures of private, profit making registries, using untested image recognition technology and untried business models," a task which few artists have the time or money with which to devote themselves. If the bill passes in the house, "countless working artists would find countless existing works orphaned from the moment they create them."
Marybeth Peters, the U.S. Register of Copyrights, believes the Orphan Works Act would help solve a persistent problem that frustrates many "good-faith users" who often cannot locate copyright owners even after searching for them "diligently." She cites the U.S. Holocaust Museum as an example, which says it possesses "millions of pages of archival documents, photographs, oral histories, and reels of film that it and other museums cannot publish or digitize."
Peters claims the legislation is "sensible," but its sensibility depends on how willing people actually are to seek artists out. Unfortunately, if you provide people with a way to effectively steal art for free, most will likely take advantage – to the severe detriment of visual artists.
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Comments (1)
This is a great article, but there are a bunch of typos in the third paragraph. Oops!
Posted by Billy Ayers | October 12, 2008 11:55 PM