Your personal creative UPDATE!!!! New info available.

That means writing letters to our congressmen and representatives. That means voicing your opinion about how we need copyright protection, as we've had since 1976, that protects everything we create from the moment we create it. This is the case around the world.

NEWS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 2007 wrote:Orphan Works Legislation

In 2005, the Copyright Office conducted a study on the “orphan works” issue. The study was a response to concerns that uncertainty surrounding ownership of orphan works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from using works in socially productive ways, such as by incorporating these works in new creative efforts, or by making them available to the public. The study involved written public comments (over 850 were received), four days of public roundtable discussions (two in Washington, D.C. and two in Berkeley, Calif.), and 17 informal meetings with interested parties to discuss issues in greater depth.

The Copyright Office then submitted its “Report on Orphan Works” to Congress in January of 2006. The Office’s conclusions were as follows: 1) The orphan works problem is real. 2) The orphan works problem is elusive to quantify and describe comprehensively. 3) Some orphan works situations may be addressed by existing copyright law, but many are not. 4) Legislation is necessary to provide a meaningful solution to the orphan works problem as we know it today.
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The Office recommended that the orphan works issue be addressed by an amendment to the Copyright Act’s remedies section. This amendment would limit the liability of a user of a copyrighted work who performed a good faith, “reasonably diligent search” for the copyright owner but could not find that person, and provided attribution to the author and copyright owner if known, and in a manner reasonable under the circumstances.

The House and Senate Judiciary Committees held hearings on the Report in March 2006 and April 2006, respectively. The Office’s testimony is available at http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat030806.html and http://judiciary.senate.gov/print_testi ... it_id=5219. The Orphan Works Act of 2006, H.R. 5439, was introduced in the House of Representatives on May 22, 2006. In large part this bill follows the recommendation of the Copyright Office. The bill was reported out of the House Subcommittee on May 24, 2006 and is available at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.5439:. The version voted out of the Subcommittee modified the Copyright Office’s initial recommendation to some extent, mostly to address concerns raised by photographers and other visual artists. The Copyright Office supported these amendments, and sees them as improvements. For example, the version reported out of the Subcommittee would: define “reasonably diligent search” to exclude situations where little or no search is performed simply because a copyright notice or other information identifying the author or owner does not appear on the face of a work; direct the Copyright Office to maintain information on its Web site about best practices and industry guidelines for conducting a “reasonably diligent search”; allow a resurfacing copyright owner to recover court costs and attorney’s fees in the case of “bad faith” negotiations by the user; and direct the Copyright Office to conduct a study on “small claims” in copyright infringement cases.

Following the House Subcommittee’s vote, the Orphan Works Act was combined with the Section 115 Reform Act of 2006 (“S1RA”), H.R. 5553, and the two became the Copyright Modernization Act of 2006, H.R. 6052. The full House Judiciary Committee took no action on the Copyright Modernization Act, but the Copyright Office suspects that work on orphan works legislation will resume during in the 110th Congress.