An article I heard about a change to US law.

[Hyperion]

Heard about this on another forum and, well, I thought you should know.
http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=Colu ... le_no=3605
The original bill:
http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/ ... hterm=0021
The new bill:
http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/ ... term=00262
US copyright website on Orphaned Works:
http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr3739.html
deviant Art News article:
http://news.deviantart.com/article/46388/

[Baconsticks]

I heard about this.

I don't think it will pass: there's too much opposition against it.

[Fritz]

Haha, internet art copyright.

[Tarukai]

This had better not pass. It'll put a stop to my uploading of photos to dA and online, but it depends for my drawings. I don't think they're good enough for anyone to steal them =P

[rabid_fox]

I love when people steal stuff I've come up with. I'm ripe for harvest.

Artists need to get over themselves.

[Rooster]

Meh, all my stuff is copywrited within the UK...so unless we change our laws, my copywrite (my characters and their personalities) are protected by UK law.

The best law there is.

[rabid_fox]

Except that it's never enforced. Ever.

[The J.A.M.]

What is the bill number, and date of introduction?

[Hyperion]

What is the bill number, and date of introduction?

According to Meredith L. Patterson:

There may very well be a bill introduced this legislative session, but no such bill has surfaced yet.

[osprey]

But I'm assuming that if you made the work in another country it couldn't be used by an American company? The whole thing was tl;dr, so I didn't really see all of it. You'd have to think how many pieces of art would be stolen on the Internet from people in other countries (such as me) who own the copyright because their law supports this.

If this bill passes, I hope someone tries to steal some of my art in the States. Lawsuit time.

[Richard K Niner]

In paragraph four of that first article, the author makes it very clear he doesn't understand how copyright works, or at least how it's worked for the past 22 years: there is no requirement to register copyrighted works, nor is there any passage of time that would cause the author to lose the rights (there being a requirement of the author being dead first).

Orphaned works are specifically those that for which the copyright holder is unreachable, i.e. They post no contact information that can be used to ask for permission to use those copyrighted materials in derivative works. Under US law as it exists now (as well as many other countries), the copyright remains in effect until the work is released to the public domain, or its copyright expires n years after the author's death (n = 70 in the US).

Only once in the relevant government website is a mention of using the registry database to search for the author, and whether or not that is sufficient: no mention is made of any legislation mandating that as such. And none of those links about any actual bill points to, well, any actual bill. One mentions that an author loses the rights to any work paid for by someone else, but it was my understanding that such a waiver was typically included in any such contract. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but unless it prohibits the original author from using his own work, I don't see a problem with that.