Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

By David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star

Daryl Cagle once again bring online viewers into the mind of newspaper cartoonists. His latest selection focuses on the bailouts occurring in Wall Street.

Cagle works for MSNBC’s website as an editorial cartoonist, but there is an issue lurking that propelled him to post on his blog yesterday.

Recently, the Senate passed the Orphan Works Act according to Cagle, that ” will make it easy for anyone to reprint copyrighted work, without the permission of the copyright holder, and artists will find that it is difficult or impossible to control where their work is reprinted. The bill also imposes new costs and procedures on artists, all to benefit Google.”

The bill was created in 2006 by the late former aide to Orrin Hatch, Shawn Bentley.

An orphan work is a work that is copyrighted and the copyright holder is hard to contact to request permission to use their work.

“Countless artistic creations — books, photos, paintings and music — around the country are effectively locked away in a proverbial attic and unavailable for the general public to enjoy because the owner of the copyright for the work is unknown,” said Hatch, R-Utah, who co-sponsored the bill introduced this session by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.”

(Sept. 27, 2008 Senate passes, names copyright bill in honor of late Hatch aide- Deseret News)

Groups of various organizations came together in opposition; some of them might be familiar.

1. The Society of Illustrators New York
2. National Press Photographers Association
3. Association of American Editorial Cartoonists

The complete list was released by the Artists United Against the U.S. Orphan Works Acts.

But when there are some who disagree on a topic, another agrees. Marcelo Vignali, an illustration artist who has worked for DIsney, posted on his blog the reason why he is in favor of the bill.

“If this law passes, this may be one of the only ways to protect our artwork when we post online…Right now, anyone can download my artwork, but no one can legally profit off my artwork without just compensation to me…The Orphan Works act works like this. [If] someone finds your artwork on the web, or printed elsewhere, without proper copyright and registration (or with the copyright stripped off), they can register it…”

On Sept. 25, Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights (from the copyrights website) released a statement explaining what this bill would accomplish; she believes this issue is long “overdue” and it is “both fair and responsible”.

“I’d like to ask everyone who reads my blog, or subscribes to my newsletter, to do the cartoonists a favor by emailing their congressman and asking him or her to oppose the Orphan Works Bill now…” (Daryl Cagle’s Blog Sept. 27, 2008)

As for Google, there isn’t any trace of a press release on the Orphan Works Act. Could be wrong…