Comments about ‘Senate passes, names copyright bill in honor of late Hatch aide’

Shawn Bentley was best known as a Time-Warner LOBBYIST, and this "orphan copyright" bill is a boon to big corporations.

This is a corporate grab which will put a huge burden on small business owners such as illustrators and artists.
This is an awful bill and proof is that players on both sides of the copyright debate; the free culture leaning Lawrence Lessig and the polar opposite Supporters of strict copyright protections appose it's passage.

I am ecstatic that it looks like this bill has a chance of becoming law. Everyone wins. Any burden that it places on artists and illustrators is a burden that they are supposed to have. The way the founding fathers intended copyright to work was so that society as a whole would benefit, not just the copyright owners.

Artists and illustrators will benefit under this bill. Right now, if I want to use a particular illustration but cannot identify the copyright owner, then I will likely use someone else's work, that I can identify who I owe the payment to. If this bill becomes law, then all that the artist or illustrator has to do to gets his/her payment is to raise his hand and say, THAT'S ME! If he/she fails to do this, he/she will be no worse off than under the present system, because under the present system he/she doesn't get the money anyway when he/she cannot be found and his/her work is thus not used.

Mr Bentley | 2:17 p.m. Sept. 27, 2008
Shawn Bentley was best known as a Time-Warner LOBBYIST, and this "orphan copyright" bill is a boon to big corporations.

Tim O'Brien | 3:29 p.m. Sept. 27, 2008
This is a corporate grab which will put a huge burden on small business owners such as illustrators and artists.
This is an awful bill and proof is that players on both sides of the copyright debate; the free culture leaning Lawrence Lessig and the polar opposite Supporters of strict copyright protections appose it's passage.

If there are decent works that the public should see, why should they sit in the attic gathering dust? I knew Shawn Bentley personally and he was a tireless supporter of copyright laws. He was a brilliant lawyer and wonderful husband and father. This is a wonderful tribute to a good man.

This bill is a rights grabbing travesty. It is chipping away at a constitutional guarantee. I bet one can follow the money trail from corporations that wanted this to pass straight to Sen. Patrick Leahy.

Rights grabbing travesty, Rex?

Have you read what the constitution says about copyright? It specifically states that authors and inventors should have exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries for a limited time. The key phrase there is Limited Time.

If anything, copyright law has been out of control lately. The original term set by the founding fathers was 14 years (plus one optional 14 year extension), but every few years the length of copyright is extended until it has hit its current length of 70 years after the author dies.

In order to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" like the Constitution says, there are two important pieces to copyright. First, the author gets to make money off what they create, as an incentive to create. Second, the work will go to the public domain so others can build on previous works.

Copyright was not intended to be a one way protection of authors, but protect authors for a limited time and then give their works to the public to use in creating new works.

I have mixed feelings on this particular bill, but it benefits little guys as much as the major corporations.

As a owner of many intellectual property rights, I have every right to maintain the copyrights of my own works, and to profit off of them, or in many cases recoup the money and investment by the 25 years of formal piano and voice lessons, a college degree in music and composition and the thousands of dollars in recording and marketing the product.

If someone wants to record my stuff or play it for a profit, then they have to pay me for it. My intellectual property rights afford me that right, unless a "law of consecration" is in acted, and what I pay into society is my art.

So in the meantime, I will live off of my modest less than $30,000 a year that I make as an artist/musician.

This legislation is supposed to be for the works tucked away in a proverbial 'attic'. The damage is done when a publisher wants to publish a work and says they tried the hardest to find the owner of the work. All they have to say is they tried to find him/her and that's it. If the creator of the work just happens to find it being published how do they come to agreement on what the work is worth. It varies with each artist.

The owner of a store notices a man shoplifting her merchandise. She calls the police, who arrest the man. But they don't take him to jail. Instead, they let him keep the stuff he stole. All he has to do is pay the retail price. They let him go.

Crazy? You bet. But that's exactly what Congress wants to do to intellectual property. If a cartoonist or another artist catches someone stealing his or her work, the thief gets to keep it. All he has to do is pay retail.

Sponsors of the Orphan Works Act claim they want to make it easier for libraries and researchers to reproduce intellectual property whose creators or copyright holders are difficult to find. The practical effect of the Orphan Works Act, however, would be far more sinister. If signed into law, it would create an irresistible incentive for unscrupulous individuals and companies to violate copyrighted material.

Ted Rall, President
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists

Anyone can be difficult to find if you want them to be. This boils down to current art and hard working small business owners/artists trying to protect their property from big businesses.

Who knows, maybe next time it will be your home - or your car instead of Google and Microsoft stealing art so they can sell it on their image selling sites and charge artist to register it on their illegal databases.

This will affect the exposure that artist will allow their artwork - and not just here in the USA, but globally. Artists from other countries find this legislation just as horrendous as US artists do.

On the upside, there will be someone smart enough to start a separate registry that will give free legal protection to artists. So we'll all pay in the end and the theives will wonder where all the artwork on the net went. Congrats if that's what you were after.

Zadruga Guy - you couldn't be more wrong. AND if you can't contact an artist, more than likely, they wouldn't be interested in doing business with you anyway. Have fun in court.

Ted Rall said it best in his comment above.

Upon passing of this bill, every artist will now have his compulsory copyright protection compromised by this poorly worded act. Senate just snuck it in on Friday afternoon (Sept 26th), amidst the chaos of the banking collapse, and the bill passed without opposition. Sneaky.

It is very bad for small business, and very good for criminals.

My response to Zadruga's comment above is, "If an artist wants you to use his work, he will provide a means of contact. If he doesn't, you should keep your hands off!" You have no right to my work, or any other artists' work, without their permission. I have invested my life in my art, and I should not have to chase down the opportunistic thieves who wish to profit from it, the very thieves that this bill will spawn and invite to steal my work.

So, someone goes to my website, downloads my art but saves it with a different file name they'll remember so oops they can't search for it again, conveniently forgets where it came from, it's now theirs to use as they wish and to profit from. Then, I, the owner of said art have to know they're doing it, be on the look out on every website that sells art, in every book, etc to see if I'm losing money? And if I find this and they're somehow making a fortune, too bad for me.

This is absolutely infuriating! Here we are, a select community of Americans, telling Congress loud and clear that we are adamantly opposed to this bill. Yet, I see that no longer does the voice of America matter to them. They serve their own interests and with no regard to public outcry they go on their merry way. It is a sad state of affairs that our country has succumb to and it is no wonder everything is such a pitiful mess.

Another gift to big business to steal.

This bill is NOT about libraries and museums -- the language is far broader. Google and Corbis are behind this. Artists are losing because they don't hire lobbyists. If this is a good law why did the Senate sneak it through by "hotlining" without debate under the cover of the economic crisis? Hotlining is for non-controversial bills and was a dirty trick. And why was the House trying to sneak it through Thursday night during the VP debate and on Friday? Google said they will use of millions of so-called orphan works, which no doubt they and others already grabbed from the web. My online photos are now plastered with big, ugly watermarks, though it's probably too late for things posted in the past. Check out Illustrators Partnership for details.

There is simply no excuse for a living artist not being contactable. Even for the most starving of starving artists, a website can be obtained for little, if any, money. And e-mail addresses are available for absolutely no money.

I think the artists that posted in this thread are raising a red herring. I think their real concern is that if existing works of art are used more broadly by commercial entities, there will be less money spent for commissioning of new works.

As I said in my first post, the original intent of the copyright provision in the Constitution was not to benefit artists and authors, but to instead benefit society. That is why copyright exists for only a limited amount of time.

This bill is back by google and Getty images, I is about greed. Just because some one cant find the owner of intellectual property does not give some one the right to steel it.