SBA Orphan Works Roundtable Webcast Stream

The webcast of the Orphan Works Roundtable is now available here:

https://vimeo.com/channels/artistsrights

    "A Seminal Event"
    "Unprecedented"
    "The most effective advocacy in opposition to these bills 
      I have seen."
    "The Gathering of the Tribes"

These are some of the comments we've received from last Friday's Roundtable on Orphan Works, conducted by the Small Business Administration. Artists, photographers, songwriters, musicians, writers and spokesmen for collateral businesses all made this the best attended Roundtable the SBA has conducted.

As one member of the audience said, perhaps the only good thing about the Orphan Works bill is that it's brought so many creative communities together. The full house is the best measure of the concern creators have about this effort to undermine copyright law.

Here are some of the key points to emerge from the discussion:

    • The high cost of digitizing and registering work with commercial databases will make compliance impossible for most artists.

    • This will cause billions of unregistered works to fall into the public domain.

    • To make money, commercial databases will have to promote and facilitate infringement.

    • Infringer-friendly databases will compete with artists for clients.

As one panelist summed up: this bill "will socialize costs and privatize profits."

If you missed this important industry event, please watch it now at your convenience.

You may review the agenda, the panelists and their biographies on the Illustrators' Partnership blog:

http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/2008/08/80808-sba-hearing-on-orphan-works.html