As you might have picked up somewhere on dA already, the US congress is looking to pass a bill that states you no longer have rights to your work. As it is now, copyright is automatic: if you create a work of art, any work of art, it's automatically copyrighted to you and nobody can do anything with it without your permission. Word has been spread however, the Orphan Works bill makes sure that as soon as you create something, it's no longer yours. Anyone can take it and do with it whatever they want, legally.Honestly: no, it's not. It's quite logical there's a lot of panic-talk all over dA (deviantART, after all, wouldn't have reason to exist without art on it) but looking at several official sites of the US it doesn't seem as dark as it sounds. Taken from www.asmp.org, the American Society of Media Photographers (direct link: http://www.asmp.org/news/spec2008/orphan_update.php):
"In terms of drafting, we are proposing to limit the scope of the Orphan Works defense to:
1. Uses by individuals for non-revenue producing personal or community purposes, including uses on websites that do not generate revenues for the individuals using the Orphan Works;
2. Uses in works of non-fiction, such as books, articles or documentary films or videos;
3. Uses by non-profit educational institutions, libraries, museums or archives qualified for treatment under ¤501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code as amended
* in exhibits, including website displays, and
* for uses that produce revenues and that are ancillary to exhibits.
In a nutshell, we see little financial harm to creators from the non-profit and non-fiction uses of orphaned images. At the same time, we want to make sure that commercial users of images and illustrations would not be able to use an Orphan Works defense as a free pass to profit from infringements."
Although the ASMP is focused on photography, there's no reason to assume there will be seperate law for visual and any other form of art.
Also, there is this Notice of inquiry from the Copyright office of the Library of Congress. In short, it says:
"The Copyright Office seeks to examine the issues raised by “orphan works,” i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate." and "Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether current copyright law imposes inappropriate burdens on users, including subsequent creators, of works for which the copyright owner cannot be located (hereinafter referred to as “orphan”' works). The issue is whether orphan works are being needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination inhibited. If no one claims the copyright in a work, it appears likely that the public benefit of having access to the work would outweigh whatever copyright interest there might be. Such concerns were raised in connection with the adoption of the life plus 50 copyright term with the 1976 Act and the 20-year term extension enacted with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998."
Reading this, I think we're going to be okay. I'm quite sure there will be a lot of hassle before the bill has actually passed the Congress, as there have been quite a few of these (first came up in 2006 and was 'shot down' quite early).As you can see, if the congress is going to act as they state they will in this article (and we have no reason to believe they will *not* do so) people on dA are going to be fine. If you have a work of art on dA, and nowhere else, and any American browses dA and finds your piece of art nice enough to steal, there is your name right at the top of the page telling him it's yours. There's absolutely no way he will get away with claiming "s/he conducted a reasonably diligent search and didn't find the copyright holder". So all I'm trying to say is, don't get all panic-stricken because of a bill that might not even pass Congress; and don't believe everything that's written about it on dA. This of course means you shouldn't believe my journal entry either; so instead I'll just give you links to official places where the definition of an "Orphaned Work" is explained and how the Orphan Works bill is going to affect that. Here we go.
The official website on US copyrights and The article on this website I quoted
A testimony on Orphan Works and the Orphan Works bill on the same website
News on the ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) website, including a definition of an Orphaned Work
I hope this has been useful; again, don't panic. Even if the bill does pass Congress, it won't be like "Americans can take whatever they want from the web and use and/or sell it", it won't be like "Big Bad American Business takes our stuff to make money with it", but maybe it'll result into less protection for artists' works. That's bad enough already, from the artists' points of view, but well... while there are still not as many artists as there are non-artists (and this is especially true for members of Congress and Reps.) it's gonna be incredibly hard to stop passing of this bill by voting against it. That's called 'democracy', I believe.
Thanks for paying attention; love and s to all