Orphan Works Act of 2008
If you do anything creative, you should be worried about the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 because you may lose the rights to all of your work — unless you have a lot of time and money. In a nutshell, everything you have done or will do is considered orphaned unless you register it. Basically, you will have to pay to own your own work. I encourage you to write your senators and congressmen and tell them you oppose this ridiculous act (something I’ve never done nor have I encouraged others to do).
Under current U.S. law, you are automatically guaranteed copyright on everything you create: sketches in your sketchbook, doodles in your notebook’s margins, paintings, collages, sculptures, photos you’ve taken of your cat, songs, short stories, etc. Under the Orphan Works Act of 2008, you would be required to register everything you create with a, yet to be established, system of commercial registries, for a fee of course. Even work that is already officially registered with the Copyright Office will have to be (re)registered with these new registries. If someone wishes to use your work, she would search these registries — the number of registries that would need to be searched and the number of registries that would exist is unknown. If after making “due diligence” to find its creator, one cannot be found, she is allowed to use that work without any limitations and the creator will have no legal recourse.
Although this would apply to all types of creative works (music, literature, film, etc.), it would be especially difficult for visual artists. Due to the vast amount of work they create, it would take a lot of time and money to protect their work. Add up all the sketches and completed pieces a visual artist creates in a year, multiply that by however many years they have been working, and you have thousands of works that would need to be registered. Even if the cost to register a work was only a dollar, that’s still a lot of money. Also, all those works would have to be digitized in order to register them. Even if you did all of that, you’re still not guaranteed protection because searches would rely on words because image recognition software is still in development. Plus, you have to respond to each request to use your work or it will be considered orphaned.
There are so many things wrong with this act and could go on and on about it, but I’d rather point you to people who can explain it better than I can. The following video provides a decent overview of the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008. It contains part of a telephone interview with Brad Holland (illustrator and founding member of Illustrators Partnership of America) by Mark Simon and is worth listening to in its entirety.