For those of you who are curious, here is the actual text of the original bill:
http://www.publicknowledge.org/pdf/ow-act-2006.pdf
(Note that this bill was shot down, as CM mentioned, and attempts to revive it in some form have resulted in some revisions. The general gist, however, is the same.)
Edit: Here's the referring page:
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/392
Also, just a note -- to say that the bill forces you to effectively "pay to legally own your artwork" is a bit misleading and also not entirely complete in conveying the circumstances and issues at hand. The fact that there is so much focus on the "pay for registration!" "aspect" of the the bill, coupled with the very prominent and supportable anti-corporate / money / greed sentiment, make it very easy for people to rally behind a cause for generally good reasons, but with a misinformed basis and somewhat skewed perspective.
This is what basically happened that caused the whole registration thing to come up:
- Bill says that liability to infringers are limited if infringers do a "reasonably diligent search" for the copyright holder of the work prior to using it.
- Well, that should be easy, because all copyrighted works have copyrights attached to them right? So it should be no problem finding the copyright holder.
- Err not exactly...
- Hmm, okay. Then how the hell do we define 'reasonably diligent'?
- I guess since there's no info on images' respective copyright holders, and our bill sort of relies on it, we need to find a way to get that info.
- So then, we'll make people attach their copyright info from now on.
- How are we going to do that?
- We'll make them register their work.
Obviously it wasn't as simple as that, but again, that's the general gist of the original reasoning behind the registration requirement.
Also, the original post stating that an infringer can basically use your **** without paying is somewhat misleading as well. The bill says that if (big if, considering that it would be hard to keep tabs on all of your work) the infringed comes forward, he or she can at least sue for reasonable compensation for the work (i.e. the amount the infringer would have paid had he/she bought the rights to use the work from the copyright holder). The point of the bill is basically to put limits on ADDITIONAL damages such as attorney's fees (ouch) and punitive damages.
There is a biiiig issue re: this last condition, however, which is explained
here:
[quote=link above]Your image is pirated and put on the web. Someone sees it, likes it, and wants to use it. Since it is pirated they don't know who you are (and of course the meta-data has been stripped) so they can't try to reach you, so they can--potentially legally--go ahead and use the image without further compensation to you. If you take the trouble to track them down and sue them the most you can recover is what your initial license fee would have been. Hardly an incentive to try to find violators[/quote]
...which isn't fixed with the implementation of registries, since the registry might "**** up" according to the IPA link in the original post. Which sort of doesn't make sense to me.
(quick, i must copyright this smiley!)
