http://vocaloid-association.deviantart. ... /33634382/
Has anyone else heard about this? The government seems more and more like it's Trying to screw over its citizens, at this point.

Google had a hand in this. Ref:http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1843 I can understand Project Gutenberg preserving works but with the 75+ years of copyright (thanks Disney) its a giant "land grab".

The Deviant Art link seems to be a lot of ranting and not a lot of concrete facts. What is the proposed legislation and how will this actually affect people?

http://www.nikondigital.org/dps/dps-v-4-08.htm As well as contending with the papers stiffing you on fees, now they have the option to swipe it and not pay a penny (this has already been tried).

EDIT: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/14/google_book_search_settlement_revision/

I don't know. I can see the pros and the cons to this, and I am not really sure there is an overall 'easy' solution for either side.

Hmmmm... Midi, can you enlarge on that? At the moment, the idea seems absolutely horrible to me, and I can't really see an "up" side to it, so I find what you're saying really intriguing.

In a way this is not such a radical departure from our current intellectual property rights traditions as the articles would leave someone to believe.

This is an oversimplification, but in the US if you have an intellectual property, your ownership of that property requires you to enforce your ownership rights. If you don't enforce your rights, the infringers can claim a right to use them and get away with it. True honest to goodness orphan works are a lot like that, we're talking about intellectual properties that are still in-copyright based on age, but whose owners have taken such a position of indifference towards them that no one goes after infringers when infringement occurs, and those who want to use these works [in ways that do not fall under fair use, remember if it is fair use you do not always have to get permission!] have no mechanism by which to go about it the so-called "right way" [since the owners cannot be identified and/or found]. The owners might not even know they own the piece of intellectual property in question.

The problem is in figuring out what really is an honest to goodness orphan work,and what really is too old to be under copyright protections. Right now Google is only really concerned with written works [books, journals and magazines]. They've digitized whole libraries of written works and now have the daunting task of figuring out what is safe to put online for people to view, and what is still restricted. A number of the works they have digitized are actually too old to be under copyright restrictions, but since the scans do not definitively state on the record how old the work is, people aren't able to view them. I see a lot of victorian books on google books that are [to anyone who knows the material] out of copyright. But since the copy googlebooks scanned has an illegible title page, their database has it listed as an orphan book, and it sits on a hard drive in limbo where no one can access the scans. Theoretically someone can still view the work in question, they just have to track down the physical copy [in whatever library or archive it resides in] and get access to the material that way. But that can be daunting for researchers if only one copy is left in existence,in a far away location geographically, and it's too rare for the library to send out ILL. Then the researcher has to pay to have it photocopied & mailed [even though google has high quality scans of the same document sitting on a hard drive out of public reach] at their cost for an inferior resolution copy. If all you need is ten pages we're not talking a lot of money here, but it adds up fast depending on what you need. I have been known to spend several hundred dollars a year because of this, when all I wanted was access to text that google should have been able to put online for public access but couldn't because they could not prove the original date of publication. These books that google has digitized are invaluable to untold millions of people because they can be viewed without having to pay anything, and can be cited without having to pay anything.

So where does google make the money from all this, if they have to pay to have all these books digitized, have to pay to put them online, and then have to pay the bandwidth for all the users who look at them at no charge? From licensing. The act of digitizing them gives google ownership of the digital images [at least, that seems to be one of the things they are arguing]. So if I want to use a picture from a book in a commercial publication, I must buy a license from google to do so: 1- even if the book is too old to be under copyright, 2- even if google never at any point in time had ownership of the work as an intellectual property prior to digitizing it. The same thing plays out with museums, universities, and archives. If I am making a commercial work on the history of science, I can quote Darwin all I please. But to redistribute an illustration Darwin drew, I have to buy a license from whoever currently owns the remaining hard copy. They get paid for content they did not create, just for having it on a shelf somewhere.

The fears seem to be that 1- google will be assuming works to be orphan works by default. 2- google will then claim that orphan works should be akin to public domain, 3- google therefore should be able to make a profit on whatever isn't indisputably defined as under active copyright ownership. Then after that is established practice, other companies could do essentially the same thing with different works.

If the law is carefully scripted this should not be a problem for written works because with OCR any actively protected work should be readily detectable by their owners if put on a site like googlebooks. Content owners should be able to have unique key-chains established as "saved searches" so that if their work gets thrown on google books, they will automatically be notified. Not so hard to implement. As a bonus, they'd know whenever their works are cited automatically, and they'd know if anyone plagiarizes them automatically whenever the same search strings get a new hit.

But there is nothing like OCR for music, movies, or pictures. The technology just isn't there yet. So IMHO companies should not be allowed to apply google's attitudes towards written works for those mediums... for now. The law should be clear on this. Otherwise a whole clusterfuck of problems will emerge over misuse of non-orphan multimedia. The implications here are pretty scary; someone takes a picture of you off your facebook or photobucket. They then post it somewhere else without permission or fair use. Another party likes the picture, and then puts it on another site. Eventually some company sees it, thinks they can make a buck off it, and throws it on a billboard as a "orphan work" file photo. And why not, they have no idea who you are or who owns the content? And they know unless you live in the town where the throw up the billboard, you won't know about it to complain.

I can see why that'd be a problem if the legitimate issues raised happen. In practice it's not likely to be something that you'll ever catch.

In A Nutshell:

The Plus side: More 'orphan' works would be availble to the public.

The Down Side: Not all things are covered.

Plus side may be not real, 'cause if I need to pay for something that I can do for free, will I do it? I mean, I do a nice song in Vocaloid (A voice synthetizer program) and I need to pay for it, Will I release it? maybe yes, maybe no...