:: Artists & Creatives :: Copyright Laws to change if...

Artists and Creatives of all types will be affected by what Congress votes on this Thursday, July 23: Copyright Law revisions recommended by the Copyright Office. Those revisions will affect the future of artwork and creative ownership and ultimately will devalue what we do to earn our living and strip us of the rights to our own work. Currently, when you create something - from the moment of creation, what you've created is protected as yours under current copyright law. If these recommended changes pass on Thursday, you will be stripped of your intellectual rights to what you create (past work too) and ownership rights to your artwork will be un-defendable in court. Another part of this bill is that you'll have to register every bit of artwork you create with a "corporate" entity if you want to have any remotely-defensible rights to your own work - if you want to sell your work at all - but it still won't be yours even though you've created it.

Take a minute to check out this article follow the links for additional details and consider sending a letter to your congressman (and one to the copyright office) to let them know how their proposed changes will affect creatives in the real world - how those changes will affect your ability to make a living - I've already sent mine. The writers of these policies are not artists; they are not creatives. They believe the "public" has a right to own and use your work (share and share alike, right?) but they have no idea what kind of skill and time goes into creating that work. They need to know how if their proposed changes are ratified into law that they are removing our freedom - removing the freedom to create without the fear that someone's going to swoop in and steal everything we've been working on and sell it as their own - leaving us without a way to pay our bills or put food into our family's mouths. What we do is valuable to society (illustration for ads and books and such, entertainment in all its forms, writing,  product design, web pages and images, photography, etc). We should continue to be protected and not devalued by removing the rights of the individual in favor of the mob like they do in socialistic/marxist countries.

At its heart, this proposed law is the same sort of nonsense that's been going on in other areas of the current government restructuring - it is social activism that weakens the country. You're told by the government that you no longer have a right to your opinions and beliefs - that you cannot agree to disagree - that if you have differences of opinion that you should be punished until you are politically correct. I'm not an alarmist, never have been, but I'm telling you, this country is quickly becoming something unrecognizable. Terms that once stood for true freedom (the dictionary definition of the term) have been redefined and re-purposed so that they're unrecognizable. The church has been asleep for so long - will we wake before this wave overtakes us?