Congress Wants to Make It Easier for People to Steal Your Content
If you blog, have a website, post photos or illustrations to the web, or produce any type of creative work, you should be concerned about the “Orphan Works Act” that Congress is trying to rush through.
Basically, all someone would have to do to copy your work (and even create derivative works based on your work, and even sell those for profit) is do a “reasonable search” to find you (and “reasonable search” is vaguely define) and, if they don’t find you, they can assume the work is orphaned and use it as though it were in the public domain.
So, imagine some scraper site steals your content and republishes it on their blog. They go AWOL; someone finds your content there, tries a “reasonable” search to find you, fails to find you as the original owner, and determines it is an orphaned work. They then go on to use it, resell it and make a small profit.
You could sue, of course. But, under this new act, you can only sue for damages and not court costs, legal fees and statutory damages. So, unless the infringer makes a small fortune off your work, it’s probably going to cost you more to go after them than you would ever win in court!
In other words, it provides a great incentive for people to infringe copyright even more than they already do!
Here’s where I found the information and where you can get additional information and find out how to contact your Senator to let him or her know what kind of a brain dead moron you think they are if they support this legislation. Of course, you might want to put that in a nicer sounding way.
- Orphan Works Information
- More on Orphan Works
- Craft and Hobby Association Calls on Members to Act Now
- A Letter You Can Use to Write Your Congressperson (sent automatically by eMail)
- Contact Your Senator
Good grief. We have to stop electing stupid people to office.
Ugh, this sucks! Give us a break here. It’s hard enough to deal with content scrapers–how many people realistically are going to sue? And now this? Grrr.
You know, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have term limits in Congress too. Two terms and you’re out. On top of that, perhaps we should also limit individuals to serving no more than maybe five or six terms in any office. That would cut down on the office-hopping too. Plus, we would also need to put limits on bureaucratic employment too, so career bureaucrats don’t start/keep running the show!
Thanks so much for pointing this out Dan! I will do my part in this. I stumbled this post so
hopefully, more people will see it. I actually had to change my feed from full to partial - it
has reduced my usual daily content scrapers down 50%. I just reached the new heights of
over 30,000 spam comments caught by Akismet;)
I think it will only increase the number of scrapers out there. It makes it easier for them, and harder on content creators. I think it’s a case of “our” elected representatives looking out for the big guys and not the rest of us!
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