Heya, hope everyone is doing well. For those who haven't heard yet, the Orphan Works Act of 2008 was introduced to congress a couple weeks ago. Sorry, I'm a bit late to ring the bell here. There's one for the house of representatives and another for the senate, slightly different from one another. I suggest anyone who is interested read em:

The Senate, S. 2913: [link]
The House, H.R. 5889: [link]

What I got out of them personally made me feel a lot better about this thing. It seems that if a user refuses to pay a surfaced creator, then the user wouldn't be able to use an orphan works defense, and it would revert to a normal copyright case (able to get attorney's fees and everything. That's what I was most worried about before). I'm not enthusiastic about the independent databases they want to set up...I remember seeing somewhere before that they'd rejected the idea, but apparently not... but as long as it's not overly expensive, it's fine with me. I don't publicly show most of my sketches anyway (though I'm worried for anyone who does).
I'm more for the house bill than the senate one too, since in the house bill, there's a requirement to submit a search to a court before being able to use a work. I've seen arguments that say this would be too expensive for users (see below article) but as artists will have to put their work in these registries to protect it, I don't see why there shouldn't be one more barrier for users. In fact, it seems like for the small amount of good this bill will do, it creates a serious hassle for both sides of the argument. I don't understand why they don't just make it available for non commercial use.

For anyone who wishes to write to their congressmen (I'll be writing to my senator) try this linky: [link]
It's a very quick way of sending opposition letters, courtesy of the IPA. Those guys really hate this bill...

Some links:

[link] <---ASMP current status. Includes point by point comparison to the old bill.
[link] <--- Judiciary Leaders Introduce Bipartisan, Bicameral Orphan Works Legislation
[link] <---PDN Online article
[link] <---Pro-orphan works guys who don't like the house version of the bill.

On another note, I wanna apologize for not adding new art in like...a year. Work, school, and misc. projects have just eaten up any time to do personal stuff, and it's got me feeling like any creativity I had has just drained out. Well, I'm gonna try to get updating again when I'm off school for the summer. I definitely need to work on my time management skills. srsly.