FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

We’ve had word that the House Judiciary Committee may mark-up the Orphan Works Bill this week. This is the session where Committee Members will propose, accept and reject amendments to H.R. 5889. After markup, the bill could be reported out of the House Committee and go to the floor for a vote. We’ve submitted several critical amendments for consideration: These would limit the scope of the bill to affect only true orphaned work. Unless such amendments are adopted, we believe the bill should not be reported out until its impact on small businesses can be determined. Here’s our summary of the issues at stake in the House version of this bill:

Q What is the Orphan Works Act?
A: A proposed amendment to copyright law that would impose a radically new business model on the licensing of copyrighted work.

Q: How would it do that?
A: It would force all creators to digitize their life’s work and hand it over to privately-owned commercial databases or see it exposed to widespread infringement by anyone, for any purpose, however commercial or distasteful.

Q: How would it hurt me if I didn’t register my work?
A: The bill would let infringers rely on for-profit registries to search for your work. If your work is not in the databases, it’s a potential “orphan.”

Q: What about my unpublished work?
A: The bill would apply to any work, from professional paintings to family snapshots, home videos, etc., including published and unpublished work and any work ever placed on the internet.

Q: How would these databases work?
A: No one has yet unveiled a business plan, but we suspect they’d operate like stock houses, promoting themselves as one-stop shopping centers for licensing art. If you’ve registered your work with them, they’ll probably charge you maintenance fees and commissions for clearing your work. If you’re a publisher or art director, they’ll probably charge you search fees. If you’re an infringer, they’ll probably charge you a search fee and issue orphan certificates for any unregistered work you’d like to infringe. We assume different registries may have different terms, and any start-up terms will of course be subject to change.

Q: How will the bill affect the market for commissioned work?
A: It will be a gold mine for opportunists, favoring giant image banks over working artists. Some companies will probably sell access to orphans as royalty-free work — or they’ll harvest orphans and bundle them for sale as clip art. Other companies can harvest orphans, alter them slightly to make “derivative works” and register the derivatives as their own copyrighted product. Freelancers would then be forced to compete against their own lost art - and that of their colleagues - for the new commissions they need to make a living.

Q: But the bill’s sponsors say the bill is just a small adjustment to copyright law.
A: No, it’s actually a reversal of copyright law. It presumes that the public is entitled to use your work as a primary right and that it’s your legal obligation to make your work available.

Q: But isn’t the House bill an improvement over the Senate version?
A: Only for those who intend to operate commercial databases. These registries will exist to make money. To make money, they’ll have to do a lively business in clearing work for infringements. That means making their databases infringer-friendly.

Q: But isn’t the House bill better because it requires an infringer to file a Notice of Use, documenting their intent to infringe?
A: The House bill creates a very low threshold for infringers to meet. They’d only have to file a text description (not the image itself) of the work they want to infringe, plus information about their search and any ownership information they’ve found.

Q: But won’t that let artists consult the archive to see if their work has been infringed?
A: No, as currently written, the Notice of Use is a dark archive, which means you won’t have access to it. If someone infringes your work and has filed a Notice of Use, you wouldn’t know about it.

Q: Then how would I know if my work is in the Dark Archive?
A: You wouldn’t, unless a.) you discover you’ve been infringed; b.) you sue the infringer in federal court; c.) the infringer asserts an Orphan Works defense. Then you can file a request to see if the infringer has filed a Notice of Use to infringe your work.

Q: Then what good does it do me for the infringer to file a Notice of Use?
A: It’s of no probative value to you at all unless you go to court. And if you do, you’d better be sure of winning because otherwise, without the possibility of statutory damages and attorneys’ fees, it will be too expensive for you to sue. If the Notice of Use helps anyone, it actually helps the infringer: it lets him prove in court that he followed the prescribed protocol to “legally” infringe your work.

Q: Then shouldn’t we ask Congress to change the Dark Archive to an open one?
A: This would still place an impossible burden on you. Can you imagine routinely slogging through a “lost and found” containing millions of text descriptions of works to see if something sounds like one of the hundreds or thousands of illustrations you may have done?

Q: So should the infringement archive be changed to display images rather than text descriptions?
A: If so, you’d have a come-and-get-it archive for new infringers to exploit works that have already been identified as orphans by previous infringers.

Q: The bill’s sponsors say the House version includes specific instructions on the requirements for diligent searches.
A: No, read the bill. It’s full of ambiguous terms like “reasonable” and “diligent” that can only be decided by courts on a case-by-case basis. That could take a decade of expensive lawsuits and appeals. How many millions of copyrights will be orphaned before we learn how the courts ultimately define these vague terms?

Q: Then what can we do to improve this bill?
A: We don’t believe the bill can be patched up to mitigate its harm to creators. The Orphan Works matter should be solved with carefully defined expansions of fair use to permit reproduction by libraries and archives, or for family photo restoration and duplication. Narrow exceptions like these would also meet the needs of other orphan works usage without violating artists’ rights as defined by the 1976 Copyright Act, The Berne Convention and Article 13 of the TRIPs Agreement. These copyright-related international trade treaties are not just a matter of law. They codify longstanding business practices that have passed the test of time.

Q: What can we do now to oppose this legislation?
A: If you’re opposed to the House bill in its current form, contact members of the full House Judiciary Committee. Ask them to adopt our amendments limiting the scope of the bill to affect only true orphaned work.

Tomorrow, we’ll email you a short basic letter which you may use as a template. –Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership

Over 60 organizations are united in opposing this bill in its current form. Illustrators, photographers, fine artists, songwriters, musicians, and countless licensing firms all believe this bill will harm their small businesses. Don’t Let Congress Orphan Your Work.

To use the Orphan Works Opposition Website just go to this link: http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/ Put in your zip code and follow the instructions. Your letters will be addressed and sent automatically. It takes less than 2 minutes to fight for your copyright.

If you received our mail as a forwarded message, and wish to be added to our mailing list, email us at: illustratorspartnership *at* cnymail *dot* com Place “Add Name” in the subject line, and provide your name and the email address you want used in the message area. Please post or forward this message in its entirety to any interested party.

I don’t shoot for stock and I’ve only just started uploading my large backcatalog of photography to Digital Railroad, so I’m not threatened by the new competition as many others would be, but still I had to take a closer look at what this could mean to my business.

I compared the image request I get from Digital Railroad about once a day and tried to find some of the images on flickr

One image request reads:
Detailed Image Description: for a jewelry client
close up of a diamond stud earing on a woman ages 20 to 40 years old.
No brides or fancy make-up or hair. Want this to look like an everyday shot not special event
do not want to see the woman’s face but can crop in if image fits. Really prefers close-up
can be a couple hugging tight crop.
Feel of Campaign is very artistic- photojournalistic
Will be running as Black & White

I searched “woman diamond earring” on flickr and got 552 images and out of these where one that might possibly, perhaps, with a slight chance if the hand is photoshoped away, be usable.

Maybe I searched the wrong words so I tried “female diamond earring” which turned up even fewer photos and none usable. I thought the one with a diamond earring would be easy, so I picked a new image request. This time with a lot more luck.

Detailed Image Description: Looking for images of pomegranates in the Greek islands (Naxos and Crete are preferred, but any are ok).

Search: “Pomegranetes Greece” and bingo. 115 hits and many usable.

OK. So the score so far is Flickr/Getty 1 point and the rest of us 1 point. Lets test some more. Hmm, here is a good one:

Detailed Image Description: I’m looking for an engaging image of a mother and child or children, something that reads quickly and is not too heavy. I’m not necessarily looking for anything too saccharin, either. This is a photo book, not many words, and is marketed to be a Mother’s Day gift book.
IMPORTANT: anyone recognizable has to be model released but silhouettes and the like are okay without a release.

A search for “mother child” gives 72,849 results, so lets see if we can refine it. “mother child love” brings us down to 10,305 results results. I don’t see any superduper shots but some are usable if stressed (I only went about 10 pages deep).

Ok. Let’s try another one. Something easier to search.

Detailed Image Description: Who has recent images of the Appalachian Crafts along the Kentucky Artisan Heritage Trail and at the Kentucky Artisan Center in Berea? Could also use Boone Tavern, Snug Hollow Farm B&B.

“Appalachian crafts kentucky” gives us 17 results none usable. Lets try “Kentucky Artisan Center“. Nope. Well one, but it’s crap. Ehr, what about “Boone Tavern“. Bingo. 71 results and several usable.

I know this is not the most scientific approach but my guess is that if Flickr and Getty are to have any success they better hire truckloads of photoeditors - and some good ones at that - to wade through the trillions of private photo-of-friends-friend-with-other-friends-friend imagery. And maybe more importantly it reminds us to always do our best. You never know what the next move is.

It made me think about how different Danish humor is from the rest of the world. I know Despereaux is aimed at children and Journey to Saturn is aimed at teenagers and adults. But still.

I also noted how little I am told about the story in the Despereaux trailer as opposed to The Journey to Saturn.

Despereaux story outline from imdb: The tale of three unlikely heroes - a misfit mouse who prefers reading books to eating them, an unhappy rat who schemes to leave the darkness of the dungeon, and a bumbling servant girl with cauliflower ears - whose fates are intertwined with that of the castle’s princess. The film is based on Kate DiCamillo’s “The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread” from 2003.

The Journey to Saturn story outline by me: Per (common danish name) is asked to stand in for another astronaut who is sick with salmonella. They fly of to Saturn (and on the way weird stuff happens) only to find that it has already been colonized by alines who they manage to piss off and then they have to save the earth. The film is based on the danish cult-classic-comic “The Journey to Saturn” from 1977 by Claus Deleuran

Here are a few screengrabs from Despereaux. Everything fluffy and innocent:

And here are a few screengrabs from The Travel to Saturn. Not so innocent:

—

You can see Despereaux trailer here at yahoo.

You can see The Journey to Saturn here in Quicktime or go here for Windoze

Når nu man arbejder så hårdt på at få fixerum til narkomanerne på Vesterbro, var det måske værd at overveje en tilbygning til rummet, hvor egern og andre dyr i den størrrelse, kan gå ind og onanere, slappe af og dermed være til mindre fare for os andre. Der kan vel også være en sygeplejerske tilstede.

Men hvad er værst: at fixe til lyden af et egern der onanerer eller at onanere til synet af en der fixer?

»Så kunne politiet udskrive bøder, som minimum burde være på 25.000 kroner. Selv vil vi fremover skrive på billetter og andre steder, at det koster 10.000 kroner i afgift at bryde vores ordensreglement«, siger Jørgen Glistrup på et pressemøde ifølge politiken.dk

Betyder det så, at spillerne skal til at have endnu mere i løn?

»Der er her lavet en skræddersyet sammenligning, som stiller dem selv bedst. Det er hverken sådan forholdet i virkeligheden ser ud,…« siger informationschef i Nordea, Claus Christensen til Børsen Online.

pivpivpiv

Even more interesting is that this story hasn’t even caused a ripple among bloggers. You’d think that whole “buy your way onto the whitelist” thing would get people pissed off.

Anyway - read more about it here at commercial-archive

Ellers er her en del stillettesko med og uden mudrede sokker, massere af ironi i kraftige pasteller og Robert Crumb undertoner, Lichtenstein og popart referencer og grafisk kunst, der slet ikke burde være kommet op på væggene. Med andre ord: hvis du er i New York idag mandag d. 13. marts og vil vide hvilken retning kunsten går de næste par år, så skynd dig ind at se The Armory show.

Her følger et udpluk af god fotokunst.

Mikkers gode fotokunst liste:
Galleri / Kunstner

• Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin - Rèmy Markowitsch - Sandwich-print med Laplands landskab og rensdyr / Sandwichprint påfugl og camouflage.

• Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc. - Hannah Wilke - Fotos efter operation i æggestokkene (med potteplante på hovedet).
• Kerlin Gallery - Paul Seawright “Knock n wait”
• Nobuyoshi Araki - diasmosaik på lysbord - fotos af kvindens blomst og rigtige blomster

• Roebling Hall - Nick Waplington
• Rivington Arms - Hanna Liden - Okulte i naturen
• Paul Kasmin Gallery - Susan Derges - vand på mørke-tyrkise ruder / James Nares - tonet sort hvid studie i bevægelse - prøver at flyve.

• Tomia Koyama Gallery - Mamuro Tsukada “Channeling”.
• Maureen Paley - Hannah Starkey - Newsroom samme dag som bomberne sprang i London. Ansigtsudtrykket i en af studieværterne - eller er det en gæst - er bemærkelsesværdigt.
• Rodolphe Janssen - Tim Davis - Natfoto. Kæmpe oppustet kylling der ligger på vejen.

• Yvon Lambert - Louise Lawler - “Something about time and space but I’m not sure what it is” - gyldent billede med hjørneet af gylden ballon. Middelmådigt fotografi, men jeg kan godt lide at der vises tvivl og det hiver det op et niveau.
• White Cube / Jay Jopling - Sam Taylor Wood - kvinde svæver over stole. Ikke helt sikker på det her billede. Det er ligesom for nemt, men der også god energi i billedet.

Mikkers liste over fotos som var så som så:

• Gallerie Emmanuel Perrotin - Sophie Calle - Følger fortsat efter sin ofre og dokumenterer det. I know - hun er kendt og alt det der, men…
• Team Gallery - Slater Bradley - Fyr der holder pandabamse i Zoo
• Cheim & Read - Eggleston med to sort hvid fotos.
• Deitch Projects - Julie Atlas - Ms. Pussy med cigarette i munden

Anden kunst der lige har bidt sig fast.

• SCAI - Julian Opie (Blur cover) tegnefilm
• Sue Williams - Lyserøde lavalampe-agtige kønsorganer på lærred.
• Tony Oursler - tallende ansigt med mange munde.
• Gallerie Emmanuel Perrotin - Mr. - manga-ansigt.
• Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery - Dylan Stone - miniaturer af strissere der knepper.
• The Project - Aernout Mik - Park - videokunst
• Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery - Michael Parekowhai’s danseballerina der ligger på gulvet.
• Patricia Piccinini - The Embrace - pungdyr lignende dyr der omfavner en kvindes ansigt.

Der vil være terapeuter, der vil sige, at det ikke nødvendigvis er sundt at omdrejningspunket for ens opførsel er, at alle skal li’ dig. Men jeg vil mene, at det er sundere, end hvis udgangspunktet for din opførsel er, at så få mennesker skal kunne lide dig. Bare fordi at der er en lov der siger, at du må prutte hvor end du har lyst, så skal man måske vente til man er kommet ud af elevatoren.

Idag er vi et lille land der er kendt for bacon og muhammed-tegninger. Selv om alle i verden ikke synes helt så godt om muhammed som beboerne i det lille land gør, og sjældent har en så velformuleret holding til hans religion, så var der jo altid det med bacon som alle kunne snakke med om. Og gjorde.