Orphan Works 2008 - Action Needed! Please feel free to modify the text below to fit your needs. Remember to FAX your message to your Representative's Washington office. Mailed letters get delayed up to a month due to anthrax screening. If you have a zip code, you may click here to send an email directly . Please follow up with a fax. You can find your Representative's fax and contact information here . Important It's especially important for those who have Representatives in the Judiciary Committee to fax and/or call them. EVERYONE, whether in the U.S. or not, is strongly encouraged to fax and/or call members of the Judiciary Committee, especially the leadership and ranking members. If you are not a constitutient, an email may not be accepted, but a fax will certainly be read, and a phone call to alert the staff to your fax, along with a brief chat, can't hurt. --- Dear Representative___________,
As an artist and a small business owner, I’m writing to oppose H.R. 5889, the Orphan Works Act of 2008. Please do not vote this bill out of committee until Congress can hold proper hearings into the harm it will do to small businesses, individual creators and ordinary citizens.
While I support a bill that would give libraries and museums a legitimate expansion of fair use, H.R. 5889 is far too broad. It would cause trillions of dollars of private property to be transferred into the control of a few corporate databases with no guarantee as to how these assets will be protected, used or abused. It will undermine the passive copyright protection that all citizens now enjoy – and that threatens individual creativity, freedom of expression and the right to privacy embodied in copyright law.
There is no reason for the reckless scope of this bill. It is based on a Copyright Office study of orphaned work. Yet it will permit the infringement of contemporary work by creators working in today’s commercial markets - a subject the Copyright Office never studied. Its stated purpose is to let libraries and museums digitize their collections and let ordinary folks duplicate family photos. But these modest goals can be met with a modest expansion of Fair Use. I do not believe citizens should have to hand over their personal intellectual property to a few corporate special interests. The unintended consequences of this bill could be a rights grab of monumental proportions.
Please look behind the talking points of the special interests promoting the Orphan Works Act. Do not support a major revision of copyright law without an open, informed and transparent public debate.
Sincerely, ---
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