How we’re going to get f*cked

Well, not EVERYONE, exactly…just those of us who intend to make our living through our creativity.

There’s a Bill sneaking its way through the government, called the “Orphan Works Bill,” and it’s absolutely worthy of Germany ca. 1935 (which, if you think about it, wasn’t ALL that different than America ca. 2008). I’m parroting the email I received from my local writers’ organization.

Ian

There’s a reason why Google, Getty, Disney, et al are interested in seeing
this bill pass:

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=CqBZd0cP5Yc

PASS IT ON

The Orphan Works Bill promotes theft of creative work, pure and simple.
This bill, currently under consideration in Congress, will deny you the
right of immediate ownership over the product of your own creativity, and
therefore makes it increasingly difficult to make money–much less a
living–from it.

Copyright law, as it is now, acknowledges that the work you create is
legally yours–your own property–as soon as you create it.

The Orphaned Works Bill will deny that right of ownership. It requires that
the creator of any work must pay to register that work before it can be
legally deemed the property of the creator. It means you have to register
with a private company to have it copyrighted. That means your work can be
“orphaned” as soon as it’s created, especially since such companies don’t
exist right now.

Should someone copy your work and leave off your name, it becomes “orphaned”
especially when the copied work is copied again and again. These days, this
happens all too easily. That repeated copying makes it difficult to
discover who created the work in the first place–even for the “diligent”
copier.

In addition, it pits million- and billion-dollar companies that want easy
access to creative work against artists who can hardly make ends meet from
their own work as it is. Why? Because it puts the burden of proof on the
creator of the work, rather than the copier.

Worse, it seriously erodes the property rights of citizens of the U.S. as
outlined in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution.

Write your senator and congressperson now.

Find your state representative:

https://forms. house.gov/ wyr/welcome. shtml

Feel free to forward this e-mail.

“The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one
right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him
all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from
him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still
leave him a slave.”

- George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court,
1921.