OK lets set things straight I have major concerns over copyright law as it stands and it needs major reform.

• My post on what was / is wrong with Digital Ecomony Bill
• My Slides from Copyleft talk
• Professor Ian Hargreaves - Copyright, politics and the creative economy

One issue is orphaned works and some of these reforms include changes to make use of orphend works, I would agree however with Lawrence Lessig that diligent search is not the right way and that a reform across the board on copyright is needed, rather than try to capture Orphan works , it would be better to create a healthly public domain. Orphan works

So I do not think the bill is the right changes but I don’t agree with the Photographers arguments.

There seems to be a suggestion that using social services such as instagram and facebook to save photos could allow these photos to be considered Orphan as the Meta data (the owners data) can be stripped.

This is followed up by statements such as

“They will no longer have automatic rights over their work”

Well thats quite simply not true. Copyright is automatic from the very moment you scribble on a napkin, you don’t need to stamp it with any Meta data, what you would need to do to challenge someone in court is to prove your ownership and I would suggest that the web would in fact provide you with a better position than say the waiter recalling when you drew on said Napkin.

My name is all over instagram, my photos are automatically backed up to my dropbox and Flickr accounts with my name on, if instagram use my image and claim they did a ‘diligent search’ I think I could well argue they did not, whether I could prove that there was a negative effect on my own income or that income generated from said image should come to me, who knows (that’s another debate about where you generate revenue).

What I did notice was that the term of protection given to creative designs that are manufactured through an industrial process has also been extended. Designers of such works will now have rights for the duration of their life plus 70 years after they die.

I would argue and continue to the length of copyright at this moment is even more damaging to innovation and creates a market for a Copyright business and for Patent Trolls.