Shadows

The Orphan Works Act.

An orphan work is one that has no known copyright owner, or if known the copyright owner cannot be found after a diligent search. There is no doubt that many works fall into this category for a several reasons:

• Many people never bothered to register their copyright before the 1982 change in the law
• Many people didn’t renew their copyright when it expired.
• Copyright law has been increasing the duration of copyright for the last half century. This has been done at the behest of film owners who worry about their early work falling into the public domain. Disney Studios is rumored to be a prime driver behind this. But the result has been to greatly increase the number of works which may have been copyrighted but who’s owners can no longer be found.
• Since 1982, copyright attaches to a work the instant it is created. But very few of these works are ever registered with the copyright office. So unless the work is somehow marked, the copyright owner is unknown.

The US Congress has been making multiple attempts to pass this legislation, pushed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other online companies that want to use images without paying anyone for them. Google has 5 million works that they would like to use.

So how does this affect the photographer?

It affect us since posting a work online that is not clearly marked by the name and contact information of the photographer could fall into the orphan works hole at some time in the future. So to prevent this add your email address to your works, I put one in the frame at the bottom of my posted shots.

Email addresses are not ideal, who knows if I’ll be using that same address 20 years from now. But for obvious reasons it isn’t a good idea to brand your physical address on web images. And I could move and change addresses. So the choices are limited.

There are plans for some sort of database of images and other works if the Act is passed. But it escapes me how such a database would be easily searchable for images. Perhaps some digital fingerprinting method. But any such method would have to be flexible enough to compensate for changes that would occur in an image after it is jpeg compressed. Perhaps several times. I cannot see how works that have been formally registered with the US Copyright Office could be searched. If you have a photo of a daisy that you want to use, how do you search the copyright files for that image? Sounds impossible to me at the current time.

Right now we are in a waiting pattern, waiting to see if the US Congress finally yields to the deep pocket powers behind this law. You can contact your representatives and urge them to vote against it. But protect yourself in the mean time.

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