The Orphan Works Roundtable and Webcast

Hosted by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration on 08/08/2008 in NY

How Will the Orphan Works Bill Economically Impact Small Entities?

View the Roundtable Video Now
http://videos.cmitnyc.com/asip.html

"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."

To learn more about who was here visit the IPA Blog

LEARN MORE & TAKE ACTION
AGAINST THESE BILLS: www.owoh.org

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