'We Will Rule You Wholesale...'

[tealin]

Impending Legislation Threatens to Revoke Artists' Right of Copyright

This page has running, up-to date information on the situation. Apparently it hasn't been introduced as a bill yet but They want it passed before the summer recess.

A moderating voice of reason - it's all conjecture anyway until a bill is officially drafted and brought before Congress.

Please read the above and make the appropriate ruckus when the time comes. If it passes I will not post any artwork online again ever. Or else move back to Canada* where I will be condemned to putter away doing rotations for crap TV shows for the rest of my life**, and post horrible emo blog entries with no art until I die of consumption and bad poetry.


*Provided US companies don't act as if this bit of US LEGISLATION is international law, which would be drastically out of character.
**I will have access to better food and less aggrevating media, but I like working at Disney. There are fantastically talented people here for me to idolize learn from. Unless I could convince them to up stakes and move there ... which would, really, be better for everyone ...

Comments

[visceralvamp.livejournal.com]

I hate our government.

I am so ticked off right now.

[kriscynical.livejournal.com]

As a freelance illustrator fresh out of school this quite frankly scares the shit out of me. It looks completely legitimate but I'm hoping beyond all hopes it's not true that they're trying to resurrect this.

This is maddening that you can't write to legislators and representatives yet because the bill hasn't been formally released in it's new form...

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Well, you can, they just probably won't know what you're talking about so will likely ignore the letter.

[kriscynical.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, that's my point. lol

I've never bothered to comment on your journal before either, I don't think... I've been watching you for a while since I found out you had a LJ. You were one of my favorite HP artists when I was in high school (c. 1999-2003ish) and I was glad to find a place to see your new work, HP or not. It's nice to see that you still do HP stuff smattered here and there; I used to run The Chamber of Keys in high school for my own HP stuff but it's been static for years now.

Alright, done yammering. Love your style. :)

[veronikamg.livejournal.com]

You could make you art entries Friends Only. (And friend me.) But I agree, this is craptastic, and the geniuses who though this up need to be trialed in front of the International Court Of Terrible Crimes Against Human Decency.

Please don't die from consumption Tealin. We need your art and snarky comments!

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

You can still have snarky comments ... if someone wants to steal them and disseminate them the snark will live on no matter who claims credit for it. :)

I could make it friends-only, but I'd still have to post it on Photobucket or some other online repository which could be hacked or searched or whatever. Then there's the matter of me being a suspicious bastard - how do I know you're an honest art fan and not someone who'll go post it somewhere public and/or sell it to someone claiming it as your own? [squinty glare] Not you personally, I just mean in general. I'd have to friend only people I know in person, but they all see my art anyway so what difference would it make?

[veronikamg.livejournal.com]

Maybe if you found a way to work sort of a personal logo into all your work, like Don Rosa does with D.U.C.K. Or you could do like I've seen at deviantart, splat a big ugly watermark all over to ruin it for possible thieves.

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Ah, but, those particular problems (I'm assuming) were taken care of by that 1976 international agreement that as soon as anything was produced the artist held copyright. This is just reversing that, it seems. For thirty-two glorious years, Dickens had won! (in a field that was not, say, child labour or dreadful schools...)

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

For thirty-two glorious years, Dickens had won!

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Yup, by losing ground in one area, all Dickens-inspired social reforms are now moot! Quick, exploit the lower classes while you can! Woo! :D

[spence137.livejournal.com]

Goddamn.

But, I don't think you've ever said explicitly here, before.

What is it that you do for Disney, exactly? What project(s) are you working on?

I'm just curious.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I'm an animation trainee. Not really on any specific production at the moment, just grinding away at my skills to be good enough to get hired onto P&F when the traineeship has run its course.

[holli.livejournal.com]

I... okay, maybe I'm confused, but I was under the impression that orphan works legislation applied to work that would be long since in the public domain if not for the extensions of copyright that keep ketting applied. Basically, every time it looks like Steamboat Willy might enter the public domain, copyright gets extended-- quite the coincidence, huh?

And that's fine for Steamboat Willy, I guess, but the result is that there's a ton of work whose authors are dead, whose heirs are unidentifiable, and whose work is never going to be seen again because it's impossible to get the necessary permissions while it's under copyright. That's why they're called orphan works: they have no living custodians, they're out of print, and they're locked away under a copyright no one profits from. Releasing *that* work into the public domain would be a boon to living artists and the general public.

Now, I certainly would not be surprised if our government decided to screw over living artists in the name of getting orphan works into the public domain. But that's really not what they're *supposed* to be doing.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

That seems to be how they're selling it, and frankly I'm okay with that aspect ... I likes me some good Victorian clipart and what have you. It seems, though, that the language in this proposed legislation sets no sort of time limit on when something becomes public domain - the whole notion of which, I believe, has already been legally established - so in effect, if it doesn't have a copyright registered with an official registry, it's immediately public domain, whether it was created two hundred years or five minutes ago.

I can understand that Steamboat Willy and other Old Images That Are Still In Use By Their Companies (the Coca-Cola logo, for example, or HMV's dog-looking-into-gramophone) ought to keep their copyright protection. They are images by which their respective companies have identified themselves, and if use of them were to open up to the world at large they could suffer from either brand dilution or being identified with something scandalous or offensive that they actually had no part in. It's hardly a coincidence, it's just good business. But these companies developed these images and copyrighted them in the first place - they aren't stealing others' works for their own profit.

[holli.livejournal.com]

This is one of those issues, where if only I were in charge of the world, things would be so much easier. Life of the author, people! Legally speaking, the *point* of copyright is to allow authors to profit from their work as encouragement to *make more work*. Once the author is dead, no amount of encouragement is going to get new work out of them, unless of course you're dealing with zombie artists.

I guess, if pressed, my ideal system would be life of the author plus, say, the option of renewing every twenty years. That way, if there's no one to renew the copyright (because the author has no heirs and the work isn't earning anyone money), it enters the public domain. If it's Steamboat Willy, Disney can keep renewing that copyright until the sun goes out if they like, but it won't affect anyone else.

Sigh. Isn't it frustrating when you have more common sense than the people in charge of stuff?

[verselus.livejournal.com]

This is so not right...what the hell?

[lync180.livejournal.com]

THAT MAKES ME SO UPSET THAT I'M WRITTING IN CAPS, ARGHH.

Wow, I'm so glad I'm not living in the states. I am wondering though, that if I post an image, even though I'm not living in the states. Could a company in the states use my image saying it’s an orphan works and if I never find out they used it, I could get screwed as well?

This is just bad mojo for artist everywhere. If this law went international as well, it would seriously change the commercial artist world forever, not to mention the face of the internet.

People wouldn't post pictures online, youtube content would go down, it would be like the giant mall of the internet just had all it's stores clean out and leave for fear of shoplifters who now have the police on there side.

Insane....INSANE! ....end of rant

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the policy would be on international images ... I suspect legally they'd still be copyrighted but you'd have to go to court (if you could find evidence of infringement at all) and US companies have lots of talented lawyers.

Excellent mall/shoplifters analogy. Mind if I use that in my impassioned plea to 'my' representative when the time comes?

[lync180.livejournal.com]

ah icic, and yea, go for it, plea away.

[trutitipudlian.livejournal.com]

http://ursulav.livejournal.com/758643.html

She says far better than I am able. 'Cept For this, "DON'T PANIC."

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I'm not panicking, I am merely Concerned. While it hasn't been drafted as a bill yet, the fact that the notion has come back from the dead, even for hearings, is enough to cause concern, and I just want to bring that concern to the table so that when time does come to panic, we will all be prepared.

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

Okay, really - what's the chance of this getting through? Also, (and I haven't read this through fully) how does this jive with the RIAA and all the crankiness they're making? I'm confused.

Another thing - let's say it does make it through with the current government of weasels and ne'er-do-wells... Aren't they hitting the big F5 in the fall, and putting some sensible people in power?

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

Also, how does Creative Commons Copyright factor in here?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Unfortunatey I don't know anything about the RIAA or what's involved in the Creative Commons dealy, and neither have been mentioned in the articles I've read. Even if the entire congress gets flushed out in the fall (big F5, heehee!) I doubt they're going to spend their valuable time reversing past legislation (or at least legislation not involving things like torture and privacy violation, which more people make a fuss about) when they could be doing the things they promised to do on the campaign (pause for laughter) and making their constituents not angry at them.

This reply has been brought to you by parentheses.

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/12/countering-the-fud-a.html

http://maradydd.livejournal.com/374886.html

... clearing up the issue. Hopefully we can all get on with our lives now. I *thought* that original article was a little bit dubious.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links, I'll add them to the collection shortly.

The original article did raise some red flags for me (too much blatant fearmongering and capslock) but it was upon pursuing the topic further at the Illustrators' Partnership that I started to get legitimately concerned. It's still worrying that the topic has been resurrected at all, though the degree to which it affects living, working artists will only ever be speculation until an actual bill is drafted. It think the matter is whether or not it contravenes or reverses existing copyright legislation and/or international agreement -- the existing laws are, basically, good; if they are preserved, then fine, no worries, Robert is thine uncle. I can, however, see the possibility of Congress passing something that flies in the face of a previous agreement or unilaterally retracts from it, because I have occasionally listened to the news in the last fifteen years and am reminded of the International Criminal Court, softwood lumber, various spats with the UN, etc.

[tony-cliff.livejournal.com]

Additional food for thought: if Mark Simon is getting paid per the amount of traffic his articles bring in (some blogs do this), then he probably just made a load of cash?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Does that article count as a blog or part of the AWN magazine? No matter, it still serves as a hook to get people into reading the dry stuff. As climate change and gun control have taught me, if you want people to take action on something that might actually matter, release something emotionally manipulative even if it misrepresents the facts!

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Just realised I forgot the irony tags on the above. Sorry.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

My friend, I am one step ahead of you. I already live in Canada!

I do wonder why they're doing this though. I mean, it's not like there's anything wrong with current copyright laws... is there?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Umm... they stop people from using other people's stuff for free?

I think the main purpose of this movement is to free up things that have been more literally orphaned (i.e. their creators have died and their estate hasn't maintained the copyright or something) but the way it stands now, depending who you believe, has much much broader implications.

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

I know what copyright laws do. XD I was just wondering what gaps or errors in current copyright laws necessitated an addition to or rewrite of copyright laws.

Anyway. I know there was a huge freakout on dA these last couple of days, with everyone thinking they had to pay a fee to register each and every single piece of art they've ever made, lest their work become "orphaned." Funny how crazy people get, especially when we turn out to be grossly misinformed. Still, I'd like to see a verbatim copy of the proposed change... alas, I am too lazy at the moment to see if this is what is on the IPA link you gave. XD It is past my bedtime, so I will check in the morning.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's anything drafted yet to quote verbatim, we just have to wait and see what it does actually imply when it's finally made concrete.

I know what copyright laws do too. I just think that that is what some people are having a problem with. :)

[aspectabund.livejournal.com]

Oh! Lol, I just tried reading your first line with different intonations in my head and went "lol, it's sarcasm!" Curse you intarwebs, not allowing for speech inflections!

Anyway yes. It is INDEED a state of affairs when people have to pay for things that people have invested their time, energy, and creativity into.