These days with the internet getting more and more advanced, you can just find anything from microscopic organisms to senators porn pictures/videos. Although with so much freedoms going around online recently, some lawmakers are out to twist realities and to commit crimes without getting arrested for. Thus, they come up with a bill known as "Orphaned Works Legislation", which really infuriates me and pissed off millions of artists out there.

What is an Orphaned Work? An Orphaned Work is any creative work of art where the artist or copyright owner has released their copyright, whether on purpose, by passage of time, or by lack of proper registration. In the same way that an orphaned child loses the protection of his or her parents, your creative work can become an orphan for others to use without your permission. Put it short, when your work become an orphan, you've already lost rights and ownership over it.

Currently, you don't have to register your artwork to own the copyright, you OWN A COPYRIGHT as soon as YOU CREATE SOMETHING. International law also supports this and allows you to sue for damages for any infringements of your works.

Imagine a LAW that legalizes THEFT. The only people who benefit from this are those who want to make use of our creative works without paying for them and large companies (particularly Corbis, Gettyimages, Pixar, Disney etc) who will run the new private copyright registries and FORCED you to PAY in order to register every single image, photo, sketch or creative work or your works will be ORPHANED. What more, it is currently against international law to coerce people to register their works for copyrights because there are so many inherent problems with it. But because big business can push through laws in the United States, which is about to break with the rest of the world, again(after breaking away from the Kyoto Protocol) and take your rights away. With the tens of millions of photos and pieces of artwork created each year, the bounty for forcing everyone to pay a registration fee would be enormous. We lose our rights and our creations, and someone else makes money at our expense.

So how will the Orphaned Works can affects artists? I took this from the US Illustrator Partnership Association:

"How Registries Will Orphan Your Work

When the Copyright Office spawned the Orphan Works bill (2006), they said it would not cause problems for artists. They were wrong. Now they concede the problems, but say registries are the solution. Wrong again.

PicScout is one of the technologies being developed for locating visual art. On March 13, they touted their capabilities to the House IP subcommittee:

“Our technology can match images, or partial information of an image – such as a single face of one person in a crowd, with 99% success... Over the years, we have established relationships with our partners and now track the use of millions of digital files stored in our huge centralized database.

PicScout is just one of several firms that hope to benefit from the Orphan Works bill. They envision a future registry in which registered pictures will not be available for review or browsing. Instead a searcher would feed in a desired image and if there’s a match, get back only the artist’s name and contact information – or be told there is “no match.”

So far, so good – for all the pictures in the registry. But “no match” – there’s the rub.

You Can’t Find What’s Not in the Registry: Let’s say you haven’t registered a particular image in the system. In that case, the best technology in the world won’t find it there. So unless every picture you’ve ever done is registered, the searcher’s failure to find a match would actually orphan a non-orphaned image.

But let’s say you comply with this coercive bill. You register tens of thousands of your works with one or more commercial registries. Are these works now safe from infringement? No! They can still be orphaned. Here’s how:

PicScout’s claim of “99% success” concedes a margin of error of at least 1%. Sounds small, doesn’t it? But consider:

– Google has already said they intend to use millions of orphaned works. Other businesses will use millions more.
– One percent of every million searches means 10,000 registered images “accidentally” orphaned.
– Multiply 10,000 accidental orphans by millions of millions of searches and you have an astronomical number.
– These are images that will be orphaned even though the artists spent the time and money to register them.
– Will these artists be able to sue for infringement?
– Yes, but at their own risk, because
– The users’ use of registries will prove they did a “reasonably diligent search.”

And there’s another problem:
– It’s statistically impossible for each million searches to orphan the same 10,000 images.

Therefore:
– Every image you register will be permanently vulnerable to an infinite number of orphan opportunities; also:
– An image may turn up as a “match” on one registry – while being orphaned on another.

There are many reasons why international law forbids coerced registration as a condition of protecting your copyrights.We’ve just given you some.

We believe the technology being developed by PicScout and others is fantastic. But it should be used to help artists protect their rights; not to facilitate cultural theft on an unprecedented scale.

Please help us spread the word about this bad bill. Post or forward this email in its entirety to any interested party.

from: Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership"

For more infos about the Orphaned Works legislation issues, just click to these sites:

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A petition site created by a deviant can be found here:
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So sign the petition if you're against the bill.

Currently, the bill has yet to be passed to be effective and 2 brave souls as mentioned above, Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner from the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership are figthing against the bill to ensure that it will not happened or all artists are screwed.

It all goes back to the fact where the WEST ALWAYS ABUSE RIGHTS, even to be entitled LICENSED to ROB. All those years of academic studies and these academicians twisted and screwed up the system that ensures everyone are entitled to their own rights, is this what the US geniuses has become of today? A bunch of Dr. EVILs and MINI-MEs? It's clear that the US bright minds are NO different with the Al-Qaeda and what's all these CRAP TALKS about HUMAN and CIVIL RIGHTS? A BIG PILE OF BULLSHITS, that's what!

As an individual and an artist, it's YOUR RIGHT to be entitled for OWNERSHIP and COPYRIGHT for your works. Therefore, be SMART and SUPPORT AGAINST THE ORPHANED WORKS LEGISLATION.

PS. Pass this around if you're kind enough or our asses are screwed