My fellow American writers, illustrators, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the like, I urge you all to be bi-partisan and GET ACTIVE! As many of you may or may not know, congress and the senate are getting ready to consider HR 5889 and SB 2913, aka The Orphan Works Acts. In a nutshell, each of these bills seeks to take away our Berne Convention given right to ownership of our works and force us to register with a private registry that can or could set ridiculously high registration fees, establish an arbitrary time line for renewal, set royalties, and possibly deal our registrations around like banks do mortgages. If we don't fight this and these bills get adopted into law and we don't register with these companies, all it would take for our works to be 'orphaned' is for one individual to go before a ruling court and establish that he/she simply could not find any link between the artist and the creation, regardless of the number of witnesses the artist brings forward to verify the artist's rights to the work. The said individual gets awarded marketing rights and can do whatever he/she decides to do with the work. Sounds outlandish but it is in the works.

This bill would result in the theft of intellectual property rights beyond any scale imaginable in the past!

So I urge you- get active. Call, email, or visit your US senators and reps immediately.