I heard from Mary Langman at MLA that Intellectual Propery Subcommittee ranking member, Howard Coble (R-NC) is stalling on bringing this to the House floor so please do urge your representative to support this worthwhile legislation. They’ll be back in session on Thursday. For background, see MLA’s page on orphan works.
*ACTION ALERT*
Urge your legislator in the U.S. House of Representatives to pass the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act (S. 2913)!
On the evening of Friday, September 26th the Senate passed the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act (S. 2913) by Unanimous Consent. As you may be aware, this important legislation would authorize the use of copyrighted works when the copyright owner cannot be located and establish a searchable dataset to help connect copyright owners with their materials. While Congress stayed in session over the weekend to tackle the financial crisis and handle other outstanding business, the House of Representative has not yet brought S. 2913 up for consideration. The House must pass the bill before it can be sent to the president and made law. Members of Congress are looking to adjourn for the year as soon as possible to hit the campaign trail, and if they do so with out passing S. 2913, the legislation will have to start the legislative process over next year.
Please contact your Representative’s office in the immediate future and ask them to support bringing S. 2913 to the House Floor and passing the legislation. To locate their office phone number or constituent e-mail service, simply go to www.congress.org and enter your zip code.
Below are talking points to assist with your outreach:
- My name is ________ and I live in _________.
- I am contacting you today to urge the Congreswoman/man’s support for bringing the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act (S. 2913) to the House floor for passage.
- This legislation would free the “orphaned works” (materials that have a copyright owner who cannot be located) in our libraries and special collections to ensure our historic and culturally significant works are made available to students, scholars, and the public in a responsible manner. It would also create a database for copyright owners to use to search for their orphan materials.
- The Senate recently passed S. 2913 by Unanimous Consent and its House companion, H.R. 5889, has the support of Judiciary Committee chairman, John Conyers (D-MI), and the Intellectual Property Subcommittee ranking member, Howard Coble (R-NC).
- Recognizing that there are few legislative days left, please do everything with in your power to see that S. 2913 is brought to the House floor for consideration.
- I happy to address any concerns or answer any questions you may have {leave contact information}.
These bills are written in such a way that they will make it impossible for visual artists to afford to stay in business. The Small Business Association held a roundtable discussion on Aug. 8, 2008 to address the financial impact of this legislation on artists, songwriters, authors and musicians. The impact is grave. You can watch the webcast here: http://videos.cmitnyc.com/asip.html
Do librarians really want to push for a bill that would harm the intellectual property growth sector of our economy? Are you only concerned with preserving our cultural heritage? What about cultivating today’s and tomorrow’s art?
Our future will be dark and full of continually recycled images because very few creative people will be able to stay in business and share their talent with the world.
The Copyright Law of 1976 was designed to afford all artists and creatives the ability to make a living by owning exclusive rights to their work. This pending legislation turns this law on its head.
Artists, musicians, song-writers and others support your mission for a true orphan works legislation that would help libraries, museums and archives. But this bill isn’t it. Amendments were submitted to the Committee on the Judiciary that would provide you all you are asking for.
Why won’t the Committee accept the amendments? Because backers of the bill like Google, Microsoft and Getty want to get their hands on the vast profits they stand to make having access to work owned by someone else.
Consider this:
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ILLUSTRATORS PARTNERSHIP March 8, 2006 — At the Copyright Office’s Orphan Works Roundtables, July 26-27, 2005, Alexander MacGilivray of Google stated:
“The thing that I would encourage the Copyright Office to consider is not just the very, very small scale -the one user who wants to make use of the [orphan] work – but also the very, very large scale – and talking in the millions of works. – page 21
“Google strongly believes that these orphan works are both worthwhile, useful, and extremely valuable.” – page119
“We expect that our use of these orphan works will likely be in the 1 million works range…” – page166
“[W]e know that many of them [orphan works] will be in the public domain, that most of their authors won’t care. But there are a few [authors] that really will care and they will come forward [to claim authorship] and it will be extremely inefficient for us.” (Italics added) -page 166
(Page numbers are from Copyright Office transcripts.)
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I don’t believe librarians and archivists seek to destroy the livelihoods of thousands of creative people. Consider that 74 organizations representing a half a million people oppose the bill.
Please ask for responsible legislation that gives you what you need. S 2913 and HR 5889 are NOT it.
Please see the website I listed for more information.
Search your soul and please push for a true orphan works legislation. Here are the amendments that would work for you.
http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/2008/07/hr-5889-amendments.html
Thank you!