The aim of this though is to rescue all of the orphaned works that should be in the public domain but are wrapped up in all kinds of mess. If you are contactable as the owner of a work then your rights are not in question. But there are tons of orphaned works that are locked up because of the complexity of assigning copyright and identifying holders.
The real enemies of this bill are big media companies who recognize it as a first step at revitalizing the public domain after decades of encroachment by industry friendly bills. They'll couch the arguments like this when lobbying - it hurts the little guy - but they don't care about the little guy.
If your pictures are on your instagram account there's a simple way to contact you. You are clearly identifiable as the content rights owner.
The constantly increasing levels of copyright are a far bigger threat to our freedoms than figuring out how to meta-data tag instagrams to clearly identify the copyright owner to stop some mythical entity reproducing your picture of your cat farting.
The balance of benefits to society will outweigh the negatives if we can increase the ability to recla orphaned works for the public domain. People reacting against this miss the point that right now if they want to use your photo they will and you'll probably never even find out and have little recourse if you do.
Either you consider those orphan works which would mean everybody has to submit every photo (or implicitly "license" them as orphaned).
Or you consider them non-orphaned and fall back to all rights reserved, which would make the database little more than a public version of a photo licensing catalogue, several of which already exist.
No. You can put in whatever copyright information you wish as long as you are able to be contacted based on that information.
> Does it mean that if someone steal my photo without permission and removed copyright information, other people can just use download it from there and legally use it however they want because they cannot contact me?
Yes.
One will believe that now with digital cameras, everybody will took their own photos before taking someone's else. But not.
This is very serious, Big companies will use the web services in other countries like China or Russia to automatically remove copyright info from pictures or text and post them. Then you can just take those documents legally "as there is no copyright metadata" in the picture.
New legislation is making Big companies benefit and small ones to be crushed by them.
If you are from UK, it is time to do something.
For instance, if a professional US photographer's work was infringed and a mere fraction of their going rate were held in escrow by the "independent body", would they get paid a pittance and told "tough luck"? Or could they pursue a more proper recompense?
Canada has had a very similar law for decades and it only really gets used when people want to legally duplicate architectural drawings and land surveys where the original person who drew it is out of business or dead.
I hardly see this as opening the flood gates to mass legal copying of photos from the Internet. People who are going to copy and repost photos without regard for copyright are already doing it today. This law won't change that, and I doubt they will go though the hassle of following these proposed rules.
This is an amazing law. Diligent search includes using Tiny Eye so there should be no concern about stealing others photos, putting them up on a Chinese site and then claiming not to be able to find them.
Also, if you ever want to get in touch with someone you can easily contact, say, 500px, flicker or Instagram to get someones contact info if you want to use the photo for commercial use.
Anyway, this is awesome.
