chronovore | this morning i woke up to this (Reply)

This morning I woke up to a contact's link to Animation World Magazine, Mind Your Business: You Will Lose All The Rights to Your Own Art. My first thought was, That doesn't sound right. That just sounds alarmist and scary, though there certainly is a lot of MAFIAA behavior that would qualify as scary and dishonest. When I read through the article, it seemed to largely be about "orphaned works" (wikipedia) - this is particularly an area where I'd like to see copyright reform begin to take effect. After all, there are heaps of works out there where there is no clear ownership of the original work, so using it is questionable and generally legally inadvisable. However, because of the cooling effects of copyright law, these works may fade entirely away; they're not in print, they're not being maintained and there's no positive result from trying to save them, only perceived potential for litigation.

“As the Copyright Office said in its notice, the evidence suggests that a large number of works may fall into the category of orphan works. We consider it extremely important, not only for the artists who are creating new work today, but also for the ideas created in years past, that orphan works be made as widely available as possible.

"The greater availability of orphan works will provide a new and valuable source of inspiration for writers, film-makers, musicians and artists generally. (Save Orphan Works)

I am not sure where the author thinks that work which is readily attributable to him will legally become open fodder for Disney and Halliburton, but that's not what orphaned works are really about. So I went looking for examples to counter this guy's perspective. It turns out, there's been a minor firestorm over this in teh blogospherez today, and at least one person has written up what's fundamentally wrong with the positions expressed in the AWM article: read Six Misconceptions About Orphaned Works for some common sense and insight. [via boingboing]