Exactimundo. I have edited and repackaged some 19th century children’s stories and poetry, including some terrific illustrations by HJ Ford and Charles Robinson, but I don’t touch anything created after 1923 unless I can find a clear indication of copyright — which is to say, for contemporary material, I either use government stuff like WPA photos and posters, I get permission, or I commission original art.

This is why I don’t feel this law is a big deal — any honest, competent archivist or anthologist or compiler is going to understand the situation and tread very, very, very, very cautiously in using any post-1923 material. The others are thieves and morons and will not jump through the necessary hoops to have their inappropriate use covered under the Orphan Works Act. They will not be protected and nothing at all will have changed in your ability to hang them by the heels and beat them with a baseball bat for stealing your material.

Read the act. You’d have to be an idiot to think you could steal material and be protected by this (proposed) law.

Ted, the AAEC should be “in their face”. I’ll help in any way possible because, as you know, nothing gets my juices flowing more than seeing libs like J.P., Wiley, Cagle and Ted fighting for free market capitalism.

“Newsweek always photoshops out all signatures and identifying marks from the cartoons it reruns.”

Well, now, see, THERE’S your problem right there, fellers …

>Second, sign your work.

To reinforce what Ted said, allow me to reference the recent Newsweek screw-up where they misidentified a Rob Rogers cartoon as drawn by “Signe Wilkinson” and vice-versa. This error could have been easily caught, except Newsweek always photoshops out all signatures and identifying marks from the cartoons it reruns.

The New York Times Week In Review section, for example, has the odd practice of deleting cartoonists’ signatures before running them in the paper.

It isn’t hard to imagine a researcher finding a cartoon clipped out of the NYT, sans signature, and being unable to determine who drew it.

I can already think of a couple of cartoonbanks that are searchable by topic, etc. This suggests two things to me (well, three if you count “sign your work”): (1) Set up a workable cooperative database and use appropriate tags so that artists’ work can be searched for. (2) Contact the Copyright Office and make sure your concerns are on record as they establish their benchmarks for a reasonable search — which, according to their own statement, they will be able to update as problems surface.

After looking into this further, I can see it as a potential problem for commercial photographers, since their work may appear in advertisements or on brochures without attribution. If the picture is then lifted by a blogger and becomes widespread, it could be hard for a potential user to track down its origin. However, and to say it again, if, after a diligent search, the new user does not mark it as an “orphaned work,” they give up their rights to claim such use and would be in the same position as any infringer.

In any case, I’ll spare everyone the additional bandwidth and let it go with these points: First, read the law itself carefully before you decide the threat level. Second, sign your work. Third, if you are concerned about this rather limited exception to existing rules, make it a habit of registering your work with the Copyright Office as people did in the Olden Days before copyright became automatic. And, finally, keep your professional associations active in communicating their concerns to the Copyright Office so that the requirements of a diligent search are updated to reflect changing technologies.

There is nothing in the proposed law that says they have to use more than one database, or all of them. (And how many are there going to be? One? Three? Ten? I can’t answer Daryl’s question about certification or thresholds because nobody knows — it isn’t addressed in the legislation.)

What I mean is, say Google does a search on PicScout (one of the real companies hoping to benefit from the Orphan Works Act) … but you’ve registered all your artwork with another firm, say Brand Ecch (or whatever they’re called before they get bought out by Microsoft). Google could still argue they looked on one of the accepted databases and couldn’t anything — it’s not their fault you didn’t didn’t register there. But so what.

The point is, it’s the very existence of the registries that’s the problem. International copyright laws (which we’re part of unless this thing passes) prohibit registries because of the undo burden it places on individuals and small businesses.

You’re right — this bill doesn’t specifically state that artists must register with a database; the market will do that, with increased pressure to sign your stuff up or risk having it declared ‘orphaned.’